This past week, Dr. David Dark challenged us with the title of his book, We Become What We Normalize.
Everything we do in life is informed by ideas—good ideas, bad ideas, and inherited ideas. Many of them are like loose little rocks that somehow become stuck in our shoes without our knowing where, when, or how they got there.
These are the assumptions we carry about God, the world, and ourselves. We may not know where we received them, why they matter, or when we began thinking this way. We simply know that we do. This is our assumed—or embedded—theology. It has often gone unchallenged and unanalyzed.
When Jesus invites us to follow him, he invites us to rethink everything—to reconsider all we have assumed to be true in light of the gravitational pull of divine love. When our lives begin orbiting around that love, everything else is put into perspective.
We become people who practice a deliberate theology: a thoughtful faith that is unafraid to ask hard questions. Such a faith also exposes everything that is not essential to following Jesus as a potentially unnecessary burden.
One burden we often carry is the religion of institutionalism. We throw ourselves upon the altar of institutions that care little for our souls and much more about our usefulness.
The Rev. Will Campbell offered this warning about the idolatry of institutionalism:
“All institutions, every last single one of them, are evil; self-serving, self-preserving, self-loving; and very early in the life of any institution it will exist for its own self. So beware out there this week. True soul freedom cannot be found in any institution…”
That warning includes the church.
When a church cares more about preserving its building and traditions than it does about being a hospital for the hurting and a living room for the lonely, it has lost the plot. It has become self-interested rather than Christ-centered.
Here at Westminster, we do not want to become that kind of institution. We want to abide in divine love—and divine love is always flowing outward toward a world in need while inviting in the outcast and marginalized.
That is why we are here. That is who we are.
We are in this together. Let’s keep stumbling toward Jesus.
With love,
Trey