Undone

The Christian faith has too often been simplified to an equation. The American Dream and lifestyle have too easily replaced the downward mobility modeled and taught by Jesus. Our identity is too quickly shaped by the world around us, rather than who we are as children of God radically impacting our world. The gospel has been watered-down, sanitized and sugar-coated and the words of Jesus have somehow become easy to digest.

Our hope for CHIC is that we wouldn’t entertain students into the kingdom with 3 songs, a skit, and a joke, nor would we explain what it means to be a Christian as simply admitting our problem, claiming a promise and reciting a prayer. Instead, we want to clearly communicate that following Jesus demands something from us. It demands our hopes and dreams, our money and resources, our relationships and our future. These words from Shane Claiborne’s book the Irresistible Revolution help illustrate the point:

I know there are people out there who say, ‘My life was such a mess. I was drinking, partying, sleeping around… and then I met Jesus and my whole life came together.’ God bless those people. But me, I had it together. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside down. I am still recovering from my conversion.

The selection of our theme, undone, points us in this direction of better understanding what it means to have our world turned upside down.

The first night at CHIC we want to explore what it means to undo our dreams. Based on Erwin McMannus’s book Wide Awake, Erwin will call us to end the small dreams, sleepwalking and settling, and challenge us to live “a heroic life, void of monotony, teeming with danger, adventure, and the unknown”; to dream of what a life radically surrendered to God might look like.

The second night we want to undo our lifestyle. Shane Claiborne will lead us, through personal example, to better understand an authentic pursuit of Christ as radically counter-cultural, counter-comfortable, counter-pleasurable, counter-wealthy, and counter-materialistic; a call to Jesus’ gospel message which should, “comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comforted.”

On night three, we want to undo our equations. Whether we are willing to say it out loud or not, we all live by a hidden set of equations… if I pray harder, God will answer… If I behave better, God will reward me… If I believe more, God will favor me… Steven Furtick will help us better understand that while we can find cause and effect relationships in our faith, the path to following Jesus can not be explained with a simple set of equations.

The fourth night, we want to undo our self. Every one of us believes things about our self that are untrue, distorted, or at the very least unhealthy. Judy Peterson will help us reclaim our individual and communal identity as children of God; to understand that in Christ we are becoming a new creation.

On the last night, we want to undo our world. Efrem Smith will send us home with a challenge to allow this transformation in our lives to flow out and impact our family, friends, churches, schools, neighborhoods, cities and more; that together we can help bring God’s kingdom in our world as in heaven.

Posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 in About, Experiencing.
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