I love this little slogan that was printed on the funeral bulletin of N, who passed away a week ago.
It summed up his attitude towards church, God, and what it meant to him to be part of the community of believers.
The slogan also gave me cause to pause and ask myself:
What is my faith really about?
Is God still in my weekly rituals of Sunday worship, Thursday night band practice and the various church-related things I get involved in?
How real is my faith?
Dare I call myself a practising Christian, or have I become like the Pharisees that Jesus condemned, more concerned with the appearance of religion and shunning the revolutionary, life-changing effects that being in a relationship with Jesus entails?
In Bryan Patterson's FaithWorks blog, he writes that Bruxy Cavey (author of The End of Religion) suggests the teachings of Jesus were actually anti-religious. What Jesus came to establish was a subversive spirituality outside the boundary markers of traditional religion and in the process He made religion itself obsolete.
It is a reminder to us that God is more than church, more than the comfortable routines and practices we blithely participate in in His name, more than committee meetings and choir practices and fundraising for new church premises.
True religion is about doing and being.
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