Like Jesus

One of the things we've been trying to overcome is the tendency of Christian people to have, exclusively, Christian friends. Even new converts to Christianity, after a few years, tend to have minimized or abandoned their relationships with non-Christians. Part of this is understandable, I guess, as we tend to surround ourselves with people who share our values. A person who goes through a values shift, like a Christian conversion, probably naturally seeks out those who will understand that shift. Still, we make a keep a variety of friendships with people whose values are diverse from ours in other ways, so why are we so exclusive about faith?

A lot of this is probably cultural. I know I grew up in an atmosphere where you sort of avoided places where you knew people would be sinning. Problem is, I can't seem to find a place where people aren't sinning - even at Sunday morning church service! So really we avoided people who had sins we didn't. We might practice self righteousness, pride, apathy, or hypocrisy, but hey, we didn't get drunk or sleep around, so it's all good, right? Kind of silly in retrospect.

At this point in my journey, I'm starting to wonder if the reason we've neglected friendships with non-believers is not because we are so much better than them, but because we are not really better than them at all. We are more religious, perhaps, but we are not, as a rule, what we claim. We are not Christ-like.

I mean, the rhetoric is that to be a Christian is to be Christ-like, or at least aspire to that. But it can be rather startling how much we Christians don't look much like our King. In fact, it seems to me we expend a considerable amount of energy justifying the differences.

I don't mean that I expect everyone to start wearing a robe and sandals and start wandering from town to town preaching, but if our lives are going to have the single minded Kingdom focus that Jesus asks of us, I don't see how we can continue to live so much like everyone else, and still hope to be like Jesus.