It’s tempting to fantasize about a real-life “easy button,” the kind you see in a certain office supplier’s commercials, that magically solves life’s problems.

While I can’t speak for others, I’m sure my wife would have appreciated the existence of such a button on a recent trip to the grocery store with our four-year-old.
While the red face of embarrassment had disappeared, she is still haunted by an innocent question brought forward by our youngest to another customer in the checkout line:

“Mommy, is that a man or a woman?”

Now, grocery checkout lines don’t offer much privacy to begin with, with your fruits and vegetables, snacks foods and sodium-laced microwaveable meals indiscriminately on display for all to see , and checkout-line conversation is no different.
It’s out there for public consumption.
Parents good and bad alike are bombarded by the innocent, yet embarrassing inquiries of young children all the time. Gut instincts often drive us to look for something to hide under (the checkout counter, perhaps?) or quickly locate a time portal (for a world where children are unable to embarrass their parents). We want to distance ourselves from our children, no matter how much we love them, because of awkwardness of the situation.
But what I find even more intriguing is our instinctive desire to distant ourselves from others in every day life, whether that’s based on social status, class or matters of personal taste. This type of thinking plays out in many facets of life, as we try to frame our lives in a way that shows just the right amount of social acceptability and normalness, balanced with the right amount of individualism and participation in groups that interest us. We align ourselves with certain pools of people, and disconnect ourselves from others at the same time, as we hedge our bets on the life that’s right for us.

It’s a guilty by association game, which is especially all the rage among church folks.

Nowadays, some churches have shed the label of “church,” opting to go by names such as The Meeting Place or Elevation in an apparent attempt to severe themselves from the any negative connotations the word “church” may stir up. Or larger groupings of church-goers will re-label themselves to further distance themselves from the negative view of church people that’s prevalent in popular culture, by using such terms as born-again, charismatic, bible-believing, and so on.
Personally, I think this type of marketing is unnecessary, although repackaging old products is often a good way to sway a new culture of “buyers.”

I get the fact that there are many things within Christianity and the church that are not only embarrassing (Christian heavy metal), but downright reprehensible (sex scandals, abuse) and wrong (the reason God doesn’t heal you is because of sin in your life).
But I don’t think “re-branding” is the answer.
Oh sure, a good purging to weed all the bad apples out of Christianity would do a lot of good, but there’s a coming judgement day for that.
People don’t like Christians for a variety of well-founded and, perhaps, perfectly-acceptable reasons.
However, the vehement attacks sometimes leave me feeling defensive for the remnant of well-meaning folks who are making honest attempts to live out a faith that is very much Christian, with the basic ingredients of love for God above all else, and love for one’s neighbour as ones self.
And any attempts to live out this Christian life (contrary to popular opinion, something definitely not for the weak-kneed as first-century martyrs could attest to) comes with a high calling: be perfect.
Those are the seemingly unreasonable words of Christ (easy for you to say, I always think to myself), which give us an indication of the kind of high standard Christians should aspire to.
The problem, which always gets pointed out, is that none of us are indeed perfect, falling somewhere in between the initial meagre attempts at perfection (to be Christ-like) and the kind of life Jesus’ time on earth exemplified.

Some would-be Christ followers disregard the reality that this process hinges on an ongoing exercise of the will after any revelation of Christ as Saviour, which ultimately, but unfairly, discredits God.

What we end up with is a mishmash of believers, some consciously making attempts to be Christ-like, others hoping that “God does all the work,” or worse, that any higher calling to be perfect doesn’t apply to them.
And I’ve grown comfortable with all this.
Not that it doesn’t pain me to see Christians pollute the environment without thought while lauding God’s financial blessing, create Christians subcultures of entertainment and business, cling to faulty theology, create classes of sin with some being worse than others, glorify positions of church work as more admirable than other employment, and so on.
Christianity is incredibly dysfunctional in a lot of ways, but that reality does nothing to crush my hope in a higher power, who didn’t make this mess and is not inconspicuously absent as some think, always available to help through his own self-imposed limits.
After all, if God can’t fix us and the unfortunate consequences of ill conceived actions done in His name, nobody can.

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