While listening to Donald Miller's book, Searching for God Knows What, I came across the story of "Supply Side Jesus." When I got home I googled it, and found this video: (click here for the comic version)
Excerpt:
Shouldn't you feed the Lepers, Supply Side Jesus?
No Thomas. That would just make them Lazy.
Then shouldn't you at least heal them, Supply Side Jesus?
No, James. Leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy.
Obviously there are political overtones here, but I still like the point, Jesus wouldn't be near as popular today as we would hope.
Dear Jesus, please help all of the kids without mommies or daddies, and please help them to if they ever see a coyote to run and run and run, and not stop even if they get hot, and if they get to a house to knock and the door, and to tell the person, even if they are a stranger that they need to get away from a coyote. And please help kids that see mountain lions to go into the house. Amen.
Now really...I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm actually a little bit bummed out that I found it.
The internet gives a voice to anyone, and occasionally I come across these "Christian" web pages that are devoted to telling its audiences why every popular Christian leader is somehow a false leader.
James Choung, a graduate of MIT, and now a divisional director for Intervaristy, has popularized a diagram for evangelism called, "the four circles." Here it is, read below for one website's critique:
Not too long ago Christians used the "4 Spiritual Laws" to explain the Christian faith. Today we now have an Emergent influenced witnessing tool that utilizes 4 circles to try to explain the Christian faith (this 4 circles presentation is all the rage among college students). The big problem with this new tool is that it completely misses the point about Biblical Christianity and sinful man's need for a savior and Christ's death on the cross for the sins of the world. Instead, this is some squishy eco-friendly Jesus presentation where you can choose to make Jesus the leader of your life so that He can work through you to bring healing and restoration to the world.
And one of their readers surprisingly wrote:
All I could do was yell WHAT???...WHAT???...WHAT??? at the screen. Excuse me, I have to go pick my chin off the floor.
Did this diagram really miss the point about sinful man's need for a savior? Is a diagram meant to exhaust the entire conversation about a relationship with Jesus? Which diagram, if any, would Jesus have been able to recognize?
Regarding the four spiritual laws, James Choung writes:
Well, what was missing from the diagrams I had learned was anything substantial about one of the most important themes in Jesus' own preaching: the kingdom of God. I was reading a lot about the kingdom of God, in the Bible and in recent scholarship, but when it came to sharing the core message of the faith, I'd always fall back on an evangelistic diagram that didn't include it. And it dawned on me: Even though there are tons of books out there about the kingdom of God, very few people will be able to share it with their friends unless they are given some tool or aid—some icon—that will help them remember the key points. So even though I'm not a fan of canned presentations, I felt that creating a diagram was essential to help us understand a bigger picture of the gospel that Jesus taught.
You can find an interview by Andy Crouch with James Choung here, and the Christianity Today article, "From Four Laws to Four Circles" here.
Every month christianaudio.com offers a free book for download. This month the offering is, Not For Sale, a book that I was made aware of at a conference on human slavery a few years ago. If you have a road trip coming up, or some room on your ipod, get a $24 download for free!
Disgusted mother to little girl who picked up a Swedish fish she dropped on the bus floor: Don't eat that. Little girl, dusting it off: It's okay, I'll kiss it up to god. Mother: Don't you dare put that in your mouth. You have no idea what was on the floor. Little girl, putting it in her mouth and chewing it: It's okay! I kissed it up to god! (swallows it) What are you going to do about it? Mother, angrily: I'm not going to do anything. You're just going to die.
--Q18 Bus
Homeless man: You need to pray to Jesus everyday. Do you thank Jesus for your food or your family or the newspaper? The devil is killing you through newspapers and the media. Are you thankful to Jesus? He loves you if you talk to him everyday. Person on train: I would be thankful to Jesus if you would stop shouting in my ear so I can listen to Beyonce's newest album.
