I still remember standing there, it was my junior year of college, I was at a retreat with other students in my major and I was so happy to get "away" for a few days. It was our first day and we were circled up and I prayed...I thanked God that we could "escape" the "real world" for a couple days and just focus on Him...and then the professor that was with us said something that I have been wrestling with ever since, "this is the real world!" he went on to explain something to the effect of this: "life does not get more real than when we are conscious of being in God's presence...and this was how we (as Christians) were to live everyday."
In the first two chapters of The Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard introduces this very idea, the very thought that in the midst of the world that surrounds us where fewer and fewer people accept the fact that anything can be absolute truth. A world where more and more people a pursuing intimacy in places where they are merely left empty; a world where self-sufficiency is viewed as a tremendous strength, where one who can go through life while paving one's own road is praised. It is in the midst of this world that God came in and provided an invitation to a life in His Kingdom, in His presence, in intimate relationship with Him.
But is this the same invitation that the Church is presenting to the world around us? Are we (the Church) inviting people to share in intimate relationship with God, or merely inviting them to receive a "to go pass"? Or are we inviting people to a religious system where we must constantly be checking off a religious to-do list? I have personally tried to live out both of these approaches to my Christian walk, neither of which do I believe is "having life to the full (John 10:10)" that Jesus invites us to experience. In the first model, one can easily become so entwined with the world that they never even look for anything beyond the physical realm one has always know. With the latter model, one often becomes so busy "doing God's work" that they blind themselves to His very presence.
So what are we to do to return to the invitation that Jesus brought into the world? Willard suggests a return to this invitation must start in the message presented by Christian leaders all over the United States from the pulpit; Willard suggests that "the disconnection of the life from faith, the absence from our churches of Jesus the teacher—is not caused by the wicked world, by social oppression, or by the stubborn meanness of the people who come to our church services and carry on the work of our congregations. It is largely cause and sustained by the basic message that we constantly hear from Christian pulpits (57)."
When church leaders decide to stop trying to make the Gospel relevant and begin to show the culture how the gospel is relevant (Driscoll’s definition of contextualization) I believe we will see this return. When the church leaders present the invitation to the life transforming reality that humanity can share in an intimate relationship with its Creator. When the Church stops trying to complicate the gospel and proclaims the same Kingdom that Christ proclaimed there will no longer be a question within the church as to what reality is. The presence of the creator God is so real, so tangible that after being experienced it cannot be denied. The desire for the things of this world begin to fade and one can experience reality humanity was created to.
