For Francis [of Assisi] religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love affair.
– G.K. Chesterton
And that's just what is lacking. Over and over I see Christians who relate to God like they relate to an idea. I see Christians who know God like they know math, physics, philosophy or any other area of knowledge. I see Christians who pray with rhetorical devices and formulas. What I rarely see are Christians who know God like they know a person. Christians who talk with God not just to or at God.
Increasingly I have begun to think that this is the problem that lies at the very root of the plethora of problems that exist within North American Christianity today. Ultimately, at the bottom of it all, North American Christians miss the mark because they've never truly known God. Despite all their talk about “personal relationship with Jesus” I wonder how many of them have actually met him.
But Francis was right – true religion is a love affair. It's passionate, it's intimate, it's genuinely knowing and being known. Without that intimacy, without that very real personal relationship, Christianity is bound to become twisted into perversion or wither into nothingness.
It is this relationship that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. That's why C. Ringma can say that Christians in the West in the 21st-century will become mystics or cease being Christians. This is what Kierkegaard never grasped. “Mystics,” he said, “have not the patience to wait for the revelation of God.” Contra-Kierkegaard mystics are not those who give up on understanding. Rather they are those who are rooted in love relationship and are so grounded in trusting the one they love that they do not need a complete answer to everything. They possess the understanding that only intimacy grants. Kierkegaard would reduce God to a proposition. Of course, this only makes sense as relationships – interactions between the self and the other – are increasingly impossible within Kierkegaard's existentialist framework.
This is why I am also increasingly thinking that Christians need to stop trying so hard. Christians are involved in a mass of activities seeking to transform the world, bring the kingdom of God, build the church, etc., etc., etc. But, outside of genuine relationship, these activities will be futile, like matches struck in a midnight thunderstorm. A flash of light, the smell of smoke, then darkness and rain, darkness and rain, darkness and rain.
The first thing Christians should do is cry out to God. Cry out for a genuine encounter, cry out for God's in-breaking into their lives and into the world. Until God comes everything is useless. Yet Christianity is marked by the guarantee of God's coming. God will come. God is not just the God of the past or the God of the future. God is the God of all of history, and that includes the present.
And when God does come, when God breaks in and transforms our present we will realise then that God is, after all, our Lover.

The authors of the Left Behind series turn eschatology into scatology. That is to say: instead of talking about the consummation of the kingdom and the new creation of all things they just end up talking a lot of shit.

I've often said that I feel like Jesus' disciples around the time of Peter's confession. Yes, I get that Jesus is the Messiah but I'm still unpacking what that means. It's like the miracle that immediately precedes that account. Jesus heals the blind man the first time and he only sees people “like trees walking around”. So Jesus heals him a second time so that the blind man can see properly. Well, I've often said I feel like I'm at the stage of seeing walking trees.
However, I stumbled on another way of looking at things.
I was reading the story where Jesus is speaking in a house and a paralysed man is lowered down (through the roof… poor home-owner!) in front of him. Jesus looks at the man and says, “Take heart, your sins are forgiven.” Of course everybody is astounded that he would presume to forgive sins and so he asks, “What is easier to say, 'Your sins are forgiven' or 'rise up and walk'?” Yet Jesus does demonstrate his authority to forgive sins by healing the paralysed man.
I've been thinking of myself as that paralytic. I feel that I've heard the first affirmation, yes, my sins are forgiven. Not simply in some other-worldly sense of a ticket out of hell, but in the sense that I have been restored into right relationship with God. Yet I'm still awaiting the second part, “take up your mat and walk”. I'm still figuring out how this right relationship with God translates into right relationship with others in the contemporary context.
Yet this is a more encouraging model than the first one. To begin with there is a sense of joy attached – a relationship has been restored. There is also a sense of assurance. The second statement will follow the first. In a sense this way of looking at things provides more freedom along the way. It is liberating because ultimately it is awaiting God's action, the in-breaking of God's creative Word. It allows me to recognise where I am paralysed, and to be okay with my impotence to overcome that paralysis. After all, it's only a temporary thing. I will continue to cry to God and rest in the assurance that one day I will discover myself walking. Not only walking but dancing.

“The definition of religion that I think is the most accurate is that religion is ritual designed to promote relationship.”
– CM
I think this definition is beneficial for a couple reasons. On one hand it counteracts those who seek to establish a (false) dichotomy between religion and relationship. It's as if religion has become a bad word these days. “No, I'm not into religion, I'm into relationship.” Christians have often been too hasty to throw away their language for the sake of maintaining the status quo. This definition begins to redeem the word religion and bring it back to a biblical definition, as James says, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress”.
On the other hand this definition is useful because it does not discard ritual in the pursuit of relationship. In engaging in the Christian religion there are particular Christian rituals passed down by Scripture and tradition (baptism and the Eucharist being the most prominent). This definition does not simply allow the person in pursuit of relationship to discard all rituals or traditions but rather it affirms ritual because such rituals reveal the particular relationship that the God of Christianity desires to have with believers. These are the ways in which God seeks relationship with his people, and in these ways unique things are revealed about character of the Christian God.
In essence this definition seeks to reveal the mutual indwelling of ritual and relationship. It reveals why ritual and relationship must go hand-in-hand if one is to fall within the Christian tradition.

To announce the kingdom as hope is to announce a future which every present takes meaning from, and in which any past is redeemed. It is to live by the power of the future… How, then, can we announce the kingdom of God as hope? By hoping. By living and sharing hope. By working with hope. By dying with hope!
– Mortimer Arias
It wasn't until four or five years ago that I started to seriously think about the role of hope in Christianity. It was around then that I started reading Moltmann (cf. “Theology of Hope”) and started journeying in intimate love relationships with people who had been deeply broken and forsaken.
I have come to believe that the reason why hope receives so little attention in the North American church is because the North American church is dominated by people who have no genuine need for a transformative hope. Having little personal experience of suffering and little faith in a God who genuinely breaks into history most North American Christians focus hope on the after-life. But even then they wouldn't tend to call it hope – they would tend to call it faith. Hope is a word that is used almost shamefully. Hope is taken as a sign of weak faith. If they had enough faith they would just believe something would happen, they wouldn't hope for it to happen. Of course, all this has little bearing on the way in which they live their lives, climbing corporate ladders, investing for retirement, making sure the kids go to a good school…
Most North American Christians are essentially hopeless.
Yet hope is at the center of the Christian faith. After all, ours is the “God of hope” (Romans 16) who desires that we “abound in hope” (ibid.) and in the end it is faith, hope, and love that will remain (1 Corinthians 13). We talk a lot about faith and love but where is hope? I think we rediscover hope when we rediscover that to follow Christ is to journey alongside of the suffering. In such relationships hope becomes essential. And not merely as an aid in the process. Hope is essential for the enactment of present transformation. That is to say, hopeless Christianity is also impotent Christianity. Hopeful Christianity is empowered Christianity that brings new life. Hope causes the future to break into the present. That's why the church is to exist as an embodiment of the kingdom of heaven in the midst of the kingdoms of the world. The church is to be an in-breaking eschatological reality.
In hope I can say to all those I encounter that the past does not have the final word. In hope I see the present transformed. For the Christian hope is different than other hopes. There is a certainty, an assurance, attached to it. It is not in vain. And no matter how dark the road and how painful the cross the end result will be resurrection that causes salvation to break into the world.

Raymond Fung, a theologian and an inner-city worker in Hong Kong, in his critique of Western evangelism suggests that Christians are operating from a faulty anthropology when they only view people as sinners. He writes,
“Surely they are sinners, all of them – all of us. But we have forgotten the sinned-against, those who are victims of the sins of others.”
And this, adds Mortimer Arias, a Bolivian theologian, is precisely the opposite of what Jesus did. Jesus prioritised announcing good news to the poor, the outcasts, the marginals, the “little ones”, the sick, the despised, the rejected – the sinned-against.
“To the sinned-against Jesus' heart went out in love, forgiveness, and gracious invitation.”
At this point we must heed the reminder of J.L. Segundo, a Jesuit from Uruguay. We must be announcing the good news as good news.
How is it that so many Christians have lost this central aspect of the good news? The good news was about the forgiveness of sins, it was about an out-pouring of unexpected grace, of new life, and the restoration of right relationship among all people and all things. It is good news, not bad news. It is a cause of feasting, of dancing, of drinking and of Jubilee.
To live a life centered on Jesus is to move constantly toward the periphery and thereby follow in Jesus' footsteps. As Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese theologian writes: from his birth in a stable, to his association with sinners in Galilee, to his death outside the city gates, Jesus constantly moves toward the periphery.
“He expresses his centrality in the periphery by reaching the extreme periphery. Finally on the cross, he stops his movement. There he cannot move. He is nailed down. This is the point of ultimate periphery. 'My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?'”
Therefore, the World Council of Churches concludes,
“In their witness to the Kingdom of God in words and deeds the churches must dare to be present at the bleeding points of humanity and thus near those who suffer evil, even taking the risk of being counted among the wicked.”

I know of two.
There is the Father in heaven. The Father defined by self-giving love. The Father of life that is only known as “Father” because he is the Father of the Son.
And then there is the other on earth. The Father defined by hurt. The Father too broken to realise that, despite his best intentions, he was only breaking others.
Into the image of one of these two I must grow. It is only through being in the Son that I too can be a child of the former. Reject the Son and there is no hope of being with, or emulating, that Father. Reject the Son and I journey in the footsteps of the latter.
No, I will not become the latter. Nor will I fool myself into thinking I can become like the former in any other way except through the Son.
Whatever else we choose to think of Jesus we must recognise that he himself makes this clear.