Who Needs Religion?

So I have been wondering why people who have no involvement with the church want to present their children for baptism. I am thinking it might be because the church is irrelevant to their lives except for particular events. The church provides a service on the boundaries of life, as Bonhoeffer would term it. When people get baptized, worship on Sunday, join a church, or die, it all seems a fitting transitional ritual. It may also be why people take communion. It signals the importance of individual salvation but not necessarily how to live one’s life.

But this is not what Jesus had in mind. He came into every aspect of humanity’s life. He did not come asking the question, “What’s in it for me?” His appearance on earth was to show how the Father was to be involved in all human life. Immanuel means God with us.

Bonhoeffer suggests that Christ wants to be with us in our strengths as well as in our weaknesses. He wants to be part of our lives so that in living well we can be part of others’ lives, particularly the others who are suffering. And if we are so worried about ourselves, our pains, our eternal salvation, well, then we won’t be inclined to live and even die for others. And, as Bonhoeffer, wrote, “The church is only the church when it is for others.”

Christ is not only for those who run out of answers because, if that is the case, then when the world finds its own answers it will have no more need for God. No, Christ is the Lord for all of life, not just in those places where religion seems to call on his name.

So…. when someone comes to the church for a baptism, for example, it will be important for the church, representing Christ, to be involved in their whole lives, walking with them, as it were, in the journey to raise their children to know Christ.

Stay tuned for how that will happen within our own church.

Yours in Christ,
George