on being an extremist, after all

I laid awake for a little while last night, being bugged by this train of thought ...

I don't have any right to go up to Concord, NH or anywhere else, where people are mostly non-Christians and probably satisified with their lives, and proselytize them into my way of thinking. I don't have any right to go up there and build an organization dedicated to proselytizing more of them and trying to inspire the ones who are already persuaded to give more and more of their time and effort and money so that we can continue in the same fashion, only proselytizing more people in a better and more effective way.

I don't have any right ... unless I'm right, and they're wrong.

Sometimes I feel that I must indeed be a very presumptuous person. To think that I am so right about my faith that I should try to spend my life making a living out of getting people to see things my way ... wow. That is hardcore arrogance.

And it gets worse. In order for this to make sense, I have to think not only that what I believe is right for me and better for them, but that it is the only right.

I am such a product of my postmodern culture. I'm steeped in pluralism, despite all my time in great churches and great christian schools. The challenge for me is to weed out that philosophy from areas where it doesn't belong. Because the thing is, I do believe in the power of the Gospel. I believe that what the Bible has to say is completely true. I believe that this ultimate truth changes people's lives and determines their eternal state. I believe it completely and unequivocally.

Derek Webb was right -- the truth is never sexy. No matter how elegantly I try to communicate it, no matter how well I contemporize it, one aspect of what I believe is that those who do not agree with the core of it are going to spend forever on fire. This is scary, and almost frustrating. I wish it wasn't true, because that means that I firmly believe a lot of people are going to spend forever on fire and also that I sound like an extremist.

The thing is, pretty much anybody who truly believes anything has to be classified as an extremist, on one score or another. There's no getting around it. And the most relevant thing I can do for my culture is to yell and speak and whisper the truth at every possible opportunity.

This, frankly, is all that makes what I want do with my life worthwhile. It would be meaningless to simply build up an organization, to apply all the right business techniques, perfectly adapted to my culture so that I could fill up seats every week. This is about something that matters. It's about the truth that our world is broken, that we as humans both corporately and singly are broken, and that it's our faults. It's about saying that yes, Jesus Christ (God in the flesh) became a man and sacrificed himself so that we could be made whole, healed from the brokenness, and so that we could spend our eternity in life and not in death. And I believe it all.