Christianity in a Secular World

I don’t know anything about France, but this article seems like it accurately describes our cultural moment:

”In Café Flores where Sartre and Camus discussed the absurdity of life, people scan their phones safely cocooned from such disturbing ideas. Trains, lifts, even waiting at traffic lights are all opportunities to rehearse our secular liturgy: look down, pull out, flip open, here and now, here and now.”

And what we at CTK hope to be:

"Christians carrying within them the reign of heaven will need to let their weirdness shine; their time-consuming religious habits, their inconvenient commitment and love of others, their solidly unspectacular contentedness, and their embrace of weakness that allows the power and grace of their servant Lord to glow. The front line of secularism is here, but the resistance has begun."

What sort of guest are you?

The holidays are upon us, which means food, travel, and family. Some of us are hosts, and some of us are guests. And there is nothing worse than a terrible houseguest: they smoke in your rooms, they threaten to spank your children, and they never leave.

The book of 1 Peter is written to encourage Christians to be a different sort of guest. To be the sort of people who are self-controlled, and seek the good of their hosts- even when the hosts are malicious gossips. The motivation for being this type of guest? That one day we are going home. Or to be more precise, home is coming to us. Sort of like this:

Become a Better You

To become the best version of yourself, go on an archaeological dig deep within yourself. Excavate your desires, and express them to the world. This last bit will be the hard part- the world will try to keep you down. Here’s a helpful guide on your way:

But what if this doesn’t work? What if “Excavate and Express” depends on a false set of assumptions? What if we aren’t stable, coherent, calm, individuals? What if we our desires are unstable and paradoxical? What if pretending like they aren’t makes us freaked out and anxious?

What if we need other people? What if pretending we are individuals instead makes us slaves?

If that’s the case, then becoming the best version of yourself is going to be an entirely different process. We will need our identity to be conferred- given to us- confirmed- by somebody who loves us- and conformed to- worked at.

What if worshipping Jesus is the only way to become the best version of yourself (1 Peter 1:13-21)?