ACQUIESCENCE TO THE TEMPTATION OF BROADPATH IRRELEVANCE
FORFEITS THE NARROW GATE JOURNEY OF GOD’S RELATIONAL LOGIC
The current church’s relevance has been diminished by propagating an ‘attitude of entitlement’ amongst its members (mostly from birth) that they’re ‘good to go’ and it’s okay to look ‘down your nose’ at those who aren’t; irreverently illustrating that ‘faith without honour produces error without shame’. The subjective hypocritical ‘witnessing’ is done often without a heart for the ‘hurting world’ but instead a desire to have subjects ‘get what they deserve — punish them forever’ because “I’m making the sacrifice of forgoing the world’s entitlements for a higher purpose and if I happen to indulge, I’m entitled to God’s ‘grace’ which extends to me since ‘nobody’s perfect’.”
The church treats (unwelcomed) newcomers as underlings or subordinates like:
— “You’ve got a long way to go and you’ll never catch up to me (naively implying we ‘Christians’ are more like Professors of Theology or Ciceros of Law and you came too late for that) — you’ll always be my rudimentary student — ‘it’s a pecking order’. If you dare question my ‘assurance’, you’ll experience my ‘wrath’, not my ‘hope for your salvation’. It’s like a club you really can’t join — just be on probation, while the most you can hope for is anticipating an eternal destiny in some dead end untouchable position in heaven — if you’re able to make it ( …. just) although, I don’t know why God would include the ‘likes of you’. It’s how we compensate for our ‘envy’ of you having experienced the ‘world’ and then somehow unjustly (in our view) getting a discount on a ticket to heaven when we paid full price. By the way, we’re never wrong on Christian teaching and won’t be corrected by an underling — don’t even try — we’re not looking for contemporaries amongst late-comers. We’ll tell you, or, gossip about you, that you’re ‘just not measuring up’, then, probably, ‘shun’ or ‘excommunicate you’.”
Paradoxically, narrow gate relevance can only be practiced through an unwavering state of appreciation in the heart of a confessing believer and is vital to participation in the great ‘Commission of Hope’. Deceiving ourselves, by ‘claiming grace’ as ‘Christians’, to cover premeditated intentional indiscretions, is the epitome of delusion and a feeble attempt to avoid facing our doubts and the hardest lesson in life:
— ‘Learning to like to admit we’re wrong, at the point we realize we’re wrong’. It’s a fundamental prerequisite of relational logic.