I have some deep questions driving me right now. I want Christ formed in me. Not just in me… because I believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ and he didn’t do all this for me alone. He is about the business of redeeming and reclaiming the world.

This I believe.

So I’m exploring some deep questions about the ineffectiveness of Christianity in our society. We have lost focus and I’m wanting recalibration. I’m wanting the American Church to recalibrate.

If the Kingdom of God is so great… why are the results around us so poor? Neighborhoods and communities aren’t really changing. We lose thousands every week to suicide and addiction deaths in this country. We are willing to spend billions on war machines and so very little on healing people right in our back yard. That is not a government problem.

Where is the Church?

Is the Gospel effective? Let us demonstrate it.

P.T. Forsyth was a Scottish theologian and pastor. He died over 100 years ago and his words are still needed in our lives.

This article from Christianity Today laid out Forsyth’s analysis:

I love the church, but I can’t say I always understand or even like it. And in my more than half a century inside it, I can’t remember a time when the American church seemed less clear about its identity and purpose.

“The peril of the hour,” he believed in his time, was “a religious subjectiveness which is gliding down into a religious decadence.”

“No religion can survive which does not know where it is,” Forsyth mused. “And current religion does not know where it is, and it hates to be made to ask.”

The core of his message to a beleaguered church is straightforward: Center on the Cross of Christ. That’s it. Forsyth’s writing unapologetically calls us back to our source of grace and meaning. Like the apostle Paul, he determined to know nothing but “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). 

The American Church struggles with identity. Forsyth would all the Church back to the Cross. We need a cruciform witness and theology in our time. This calls us to sacrifice. We want dominance. Christ wants us as yeast in the dough.

I am hungry for the reality of the Kingdom. I am hungry for that reality to be made manifest in communities where addictions are broken and the marginalized are seen and helped in significant ways. This is the goodness of the Kingdom of God.

This is the serious pursuit I long for.