That is a phrase that, the last two times I heard it, made me feel incredibly alienated. Mainly because both times I didn’t do or wasn’t what “All Christians should”. Both times the people who said it were people I’d consider friends or at least people I liked hanging around with. They were making statements which they thought were fairly self-evident and were basic requirements of being a Christian. The statement to them was obvious from Jesus’ teaching or the Bible. But in both cases that’s not the way I’d seen it and them telling me that I wasn’t a proper Christian left me feeling hurt and excluded. I get some people’s feeling that there needs to be a bare minimum that you have to believe or act to be a Christian and for that to actually mean something. Maybe there is a point there and I’d probably allow it for something like Jesus’ two commandments (Love God and Love one another). But every time you put up a wall you are excluding people. My interpretation of Jesus’ radical message is that he was preaching the exact opposite. Jesus preaches a Gospel of radical inclusion talking to anyone who will listen, eating and living with those considered unclean and spreading his faith to people beyond his people. I recently heard a great analogy that the Church can either be a castle walling itself up from everyone else or to be like a seed thrower spreading chucking out seeds in all directions. Every wall we put up we are shutting someone out and hurting that person in doing so. Do we really believe that Jesus would have wanted a church that said no you can’t come in because you believe X or Y? Or should we as Christians instead except other people’s different interpretations of Jesus’ radical message and instead focus on living out God’s love in the world today?
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