Our family has a really funny, cute, and lively little nephew named Tim. Tim is about four years old now, but when he was a really little guy, around two years old, he used to have an expression that has now become common vernacular around our house..."Poopie Doodie"
Tim used to say this just about all the time. It was used interchangeably as an expression of fun, frustration, and mostly to get his cousins to laugh. Tim is a showman, just like his Dad. We now use this expression in our house to replace other, less acceptable forms of verbal frustration.
Well people, we have Poopie Doodie Problems in the church, but perhaps we don't realize it. Wait, I am SURE we don't realize it. If we did, we would stop this behavior.
Thanks to Michael Spencer, over at Internet Monk, I have found evidence of something that makes me nearly wretch. The selling of Christian......stuff, and lots of it.
James Watkins, of the Charlotte Observer has a column you really need to read, called the "Christian Industrial Complex". As it turns out, the Christian retail industry topped $4.5 billion in gross sales last year. Now, if my math is correct, if you took $30 per month, and used it to support a child in the third world, you could support 250,000 children for the next 50 years! Or alternately, you could support 1,000,000 children for the next 12.5 years - to the point at which they might hopefully be self sufficient. Now that might really make a difference in our weary world.
Either way, something is sick in our culture. Maybe this is why folks find the church irrelevant so often. We are so caught up by the latest trends; The Purpose Driven This, and the Prayer of Jabez That, The Wild At Heart This, and the Your Best Life Now That.
We aren't any different than much of the rest of the modern culture, behaving like lemmings, we Christian folk. We follow the latest popular fad, rather than focusing on important things, the mystery of the Word made flesh, and how our faith can be more transformational, the ways that Christ can transform our faith, and help us to really, really love other people well.
Or maybe not. You decide.
