To begin and sum up I would say that this site, and what I hope to one day be this movement, is a battle against what I (and others) call felt-board Christianity. For those who don’t know, a felt-board is what people used to teach Sunday School with before the over-head projector. It was made up of, a green felt background and felt characters that all looked exactly the same, stuck to each other and were moved around to illustrate a story. What this means it that all we know (my generation and the ones below us) is what we were taught in Sunday school as a children. We haven’t studied the stories for ourselves or even questioned what we were told.

11. The people here were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, since they welcomed the message with eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. 12. Consequently, many of them believed, including a number of the prominent Greek women as well as men. -Acts 17:11-12

These verses are what I would call the theme verses for this site. It is based, obviously, in Acts, Paul has just come from a city where they tried to kill him and he’s now landed in a land called Beroea. It says these Beroeans were open minded and welcomed Paul’s message. Then it goes on to say they searched the scriptures to see if it was true! Now seems like a good time to say that I am not an anarchist. I don’t think that all church policies are wrong, in fact I believe most of them are well founded and completely sound. But I do think we need to constantly re-think them in case they are wrong or in case there is a deeper meaning we may have missed.

12. Consequently, many of them believed, including a number of the prominent Greek women as well as men. -Acts 17:12

Here is the cool part and the part we miss… it’s in verse twelve… did you catch it?

“Consequently!!” In other words, Paul just said, “Oh, by the way.” Paul effectively said, for this moment at least, that people getting saved is an afterthought compared to people being open and searching for themselves.

All that was just an introduction to this: Re-think… or Retire. All religions be it Christianity or otherwise require many things to be successful and grow. The biggest thing (other than truth, which only we as Christians have) is forward motion. Let me explain, by forward motion I mean that we need to be moving forward. Hard to grasp, right? But for some reason for the last ten years or so it’s been one of the least done things in church.

Have you ever gone to a nursing home to visit a relative because you had too? They always smell like mold and your relative tells the same story every time. For me it was my great grandmother. Just like everyone else, I would go and sit and she would tell her one story. Sometimes even twice in one visit. I just zoned out. Somehow this story I had heard somewhere around a hundred times had lost its effect.

In the last ten years the church has become this way. We have gotten set in our ways, have started molding from the inside out, and have been telling the same old stories. We never stop to think we may have some detail wrong or that maybe we need to change this up a bit. Now, again let me pause and say, I’m really not an anarchist. I’m not even saying a whole lot will change. I do think we need to Re-Think what we believe and what we learn and what we hear. What I am saying is that we need to re-think or we are just going to retire and die in this Retirement Community for Religions the world has put us in.

Ultimately it’s a Choice
So Choose
Re-think…or Retire