When you read the New Testament, one of the things you notice is that Jesus spends more time criticising the religious folk than the non-religious folk.
In fact, he sometimes goes as far as calling religious people hypocrites and broods of vipers. The people he shows most compassion to are the "sinners" (although the religious people are sinners too, only they should know better).
So it makes you think, if Jesus were around today (in the same way as he was 2000 years ago) then what would he be doing? I imagine he would be in all sorts of places, pubs, clubs, restaurants... out in the hills, walking in the forests. And the people he would be most critical of would probably be church folk. Not everyone of course, but largely us.
But what is also really interesting, and it's really easy to miss this when you're reading the New Testament, is that Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi. So he was also one of the religious folk. He studied in the temple as a boy, he learned about the Torah and the Old Testament. He was respected as a Rabbi and called people to follow him, and be his disciples - just as many other Rabbis would have done.
So Jesus was not anti-religion or anti-tradition. However, he wasn't calling people to a tradition, he was calling people to a God and a way of life - to himself.
Traditions and religious institutions are great. They can teach us, inform us, help us understand God better. But the moment they try and convert people to follow that tradition, they have lost the focus of what they're trying to achieve and suddenly we face a real risk of being one of those Pharisees or Sadducees.
We are witnesses for Christ. The church is the term given to us as a body of believers. We are not trying to get people to come to church. We are not trying to boost church membership. Trying to boost church membership is like getting obsessed with lowering crime statistics - the point is not the statistic, the point is the crime! And the statistics are just a measure of the crime.
In the same way, the church is a measure of people being drawn to Christ. And that is what we are to keep our eyes focused on at all times.
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