Beware of Christians

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle." -Brennan Manning

http://bewareofchristians.com/flash.html#/TRAILER

As we walked into Winthrop's theater tonight ten minutes early, we struggled to find a seat. This documentary titled "Beware of Christians" had brought a few hundred students out of their dorm rooms for two and a half hours on a Monday night.  I don't know what everyone else was expecting, but I can tell you what I was not expecting...a slap in the face (...or on the back for that matter...nevermind you would understand if you saw the film). This is probably the best documentary I have ever seen. Four college students get real and tell it like it is. They take the beliefs they've been told all of her lives and throw them out the window to discover what it is like to get out of American Christianity.

Many topics in this documentary stood out to me but none more than the title itself. "Beware of Christians." I was thinking that maybe this film was going to be about crazy on-fire, Jesus-loving, die-hard Christians. Although these guys were some of those things, their approach to the title was different. One of the guys said "They warn us to beware of alcohol. They warn us to beware of premarital sex, but maybe the thing we should be being told is to beware of Christians." In saying this he was referring to the fact that things such as alcohol and premarital sex can keep us from getting close to God, but he reverses it and asks that maybe the things keeping us the furthest away from God is other Christians, or even our own Christianity. That maybe organized religion and American Christianity that we have grown up with are the things that hinder us the most from being real Christians.The quote at the beginning of this blog is meaning the same thing. That we as Christians are the biggest obstacles that others have to go through to get to Jesus, and if they are blind enough to get past our hypocrisy, then maybe they will find their way to what we call Christianity. Then those who find their way to God look at other Christians to find out how to live and join us in becoming the barrier between the lost and God; just making the wall harder and thicker to overcome. So what do we really believe? It may not take a 5 week trip to Europe to find out, but it will take making God and His mission the center-most point of our lives and abandoning all the worldly things that hinder us from becoming one with Him.

In the film these four guys travel across Europe to uncover the topics that they struggle with and that God either calls us to abandon or approach. These seven topics were church, identity, relationships, alcohol, materialism, wealth/poverty, and entertainment. Almost every single one hit home and was a call to make a radical change. These guys did a magnificent job, and I challenge you to watch this film unless you are too afraid for someone to call you out on your flaws or are too afraid to be a real Christian.

"...So I had a lot of great plans, but recently Jesus completely ruined them..."

*I have a copy if you want it.