About a week ago, Naked Pastor published yet another stunning cartoon. Through it, NP was stating that you really cannot start out by disliking who people are. As a response to this, some of the commenters argued that we needed to be more ambitious for our churches and start envisioning what could be, instead of simply loving what is.
Today as I re-read the fairly socialist stance of my previous posts, I was reminded that Christians hope not only for the liberation of the poor, but for the liberation of the rich also. Our hope is that Christians in the West will wake up to their responsibilities as Christians and start being the church.
Yet, if we consider that dependence on the Western system is a form of addiction, then affluent Christians need to be loved as well. We tend to think that it’s okay to bawl them out because they "can take it" and they really need to be scared into action. Still, I believe that not all of them are self-righteous hypocrites. Some of them need to be loved into trusting God and the community of believers. Some of them need to be shown ways of living out the gospels. Above all, some of them need to be trusted with it, much in the way in which Andre Trocme trusted his congregation.
This is where I really love Shane Claiborne’s voice. There are instances in which I find him plain annoying (e.g., recycling bath water), but I really admire the way in which he relates to middle-class folks without an ounce of judgement. By being genuinely fond of people while remaining consistent with the demands he lays out, he quite simply makes the gospel attractive to them. And I could not agree more with the message behind Naked Pastor’s cartoon.
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