A Year With Jesus

This past Sunday we began The Year With Jesus at Elmhurst Presbyterian Church. It is an intensive effort to learn more about Jesus at every level of knowledge. The Year With Jesus will include sermons and worship themes, Christian Education classes, small group study, and intentional engagement with social concerns. We need to know more about his life and his teaching, and we need to experience his presence with us. As we do, we will learn more about how to follow him in our daily world.

In this year of sermons and studies, I will be acknowledging my indebtedness to Michael Frost, an Australian missiologist whose books are very challenging to contemporary North American Christians. Especially pertinent to me is his recent volume, ReJesus: A Wild Messiah For A Missional Church. He tells us that for the church to be renewed and energized in the 21st century, we have be captured again by the real Jesus, not the one sanitized by the church. It will be a shock to many people to see Jesus as a wild and irreverent prophet whose teachings were so revolutionary. The church has tried to contain and domesticate Jesus, but now he has to be released. This is the Jesus the world loves even as it rejects the Christian faith.

The provocative thought from Sunday was that the church has to become a "conspiracy of little Jesuses." Christians are "little Christs." Jesus is not to be worshipped so much as he is to be imitated and followed, and to do that means you adopt for yourself the values embodied in his life and teaching. Little Jesuses infiltrate the world with his life, transforming it in ways the institutional church never could.

At a strategic planning meeting last March, one of our elders perceptively noted that "we just don't know that much about Jesus." Now is the time to learn. But a warning: don't be surprised when what you learn starts changing you.