Why The Black Church Looks Nothing Like Christ
The most egregious problem with today’s black church is its lack of love. Without love, we are powerless. Without love, we are in bondage. Pettiness is bondage. Childishness is bondage. Impatience, beloved, is bondage. If we had it—God’s love—it would show. There’d be some evidence in our lives of God’s peace, of His love for us. So much love that we’d want to share it. The dynamics of these places are so antithetical to the personal example of Jesus Christ that I can hardly qualify them as churches. Welcome to The Matrix. A place that seems real, that seems reasonable, but is in fact a lie.
To know Christ, to truly know Him, is to be
homeless.
You may own a house, but that building is
not your home. It is, at best, a distraction: an illusion and a
pale imitation of the good things God has in store for us. Yet
we invest more time and energy and money in that house than we
do in our actual home—our eternal home with God. If you bought
more house than you can afford, that, by definition, is bondage.
It is an investment in a substitute reality wherein we govern
ourselves the way the world does and we model our behavior after
the accepted norms of this world, a condition we can rightfully
compare to The Matrix.
The Matrix, for the three people who have not seen the
blockbuster film trilogy, posits the notion that reality as we
know it is actually a carefully constructed illusion designed to
entertain our minds while artificial intelligence machines use
our bodies as living batteries to power themselves. The Matrix
church, by syllogistic argument, likewise creates a blasphemous,
artificial environment which claims to be a Christian organism
while embodying almost none of the qualities of Christ. The
Matrix church, much like the Matrix in the movie, exists to
leech money off its membership. It exists mainly to congratulate
itself on existing.
Let's take a look at some of our common practices and place them within biblical context in order to see how far the rabbit hole goes. CONTINUED
