More Christians or Better Christians?

One of my biggest problems as a Christian is the notion that I am a recruiting agent for my religion. It is essential to my faith that I try to expand my grouping, and therefore my grouping's power and profile and resources. I am encouraged to do this not just as a practical matter - our church needs more supporters - but as part of being Christian. I am always to be at odds with non-Christians, always struggling to defeat their non-Christianness. It is a matter of winning souls for Jesus, which is a very individualistic view.

Christianity is about saving your individual, personal, soul from its individual, personal, eternal punishment. I express Christian love by trying to spare you, who I am called to love, from such a fate. And I repeat the process on as many other personal, individual, souls as I can before I die. There are seven billion people on earth and I am already well past my youth - it is a monumental task. But I must try, because God and the Devil are keeping score: so many for Jesus, so many for Satan. Maybe they have money on this game. There is a precedent for God and Satan making bets.

I am drawn more to the vision of the kingdom of God than to the vision of a personal afterlife in heaven. The kingdom is a transformed earth, one of justice, peace, plenty, an absence of death and war and sin, a flourishing of life without conflict. Does that in any way sound like a world in which everyone is Christian? It doesn't to me. Christians fight in wars, abuse minorities, break into sectarianism, display greed, just like everyone else. Indeed we often say we are not people who don't sin, just people who are forgiven for our sins. In what way is, and does the bible ever say that, the prerequisite for the kingdom is everyone in the world converting to Anglicanism?

As a liberal Christian I respect and feel I can learn from non-Christians, not just pity them and try to change them. I do not see Christianity in individual terms, or in scorecard terms. I see it in terms of a way of life that requires faith, and love, and hope. Faith in Christ, love for all (and love respects other people's difference and does not just try to remake the other in my own image), and hope for the kingdom, trust in God. I do not feel I am being tested to see how many I can recruit to a given 'side'.

I do not think Christianity has all the answers because I know it does not have all the questions. 'Sin' is not an issue in other faiths, so a cure for sin is not a something they even seek. Before we can introduce the idea of the forgiveness of sins we have to introduce the idea, convince them of the idea, of sin. It may be an idea that grows naturally out of Judaism, but that only makes it more specifically Christian.

I struggle with recruiting, and it may be that I am just justifying my own reluctance to put myself forward and in people's faces. But is a Christian supposed to relate to non-Christians with pity, scorn, desperation, seduction, argument, and politics, even if those things are disguised as love, rather than respect, openness, dialogue, softness, explanation, example, and working together for that kingdom to  come? Is it really about increasing the number of Baptists in the world and decreasing the number of Buddhists, or about convincing God not to torture you - by getting you to agree with me?

The thing is, it may in fact be about those things. I may be naive thinking everything will be all right in the end, or that the struggle I engage in should be with harm, war, injustice, materialism, loneliness, poverty and fear, and not with atheists, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. Maybe my job is to increase the number of Christians in the world, rather than increase the quality of Christianity people who are already Christians practice. But Jesus, who was Jewish, criticized the Jewish leaders for the quality of Judaism they practised. That is one reason why I think too much emphasis has been placed on the number of people who are Christians, and not enough on the quality of the Christianity they
practice.