The Mask

I regret not posting a blog sooner, but insanely enough being in the Bible College of Wales my time seems to be evaporated in greater and greater quantities.

Wales is as wonderful as its ever been and I’m enjoying my time here more than ever. The students and I are buckling in for a crazy essay ride which is going to hit us some time soon, so I’m cramming as much Bible and prayer into my time here as I can.

One of the things about being in Bible College is that the people around and about you expect you to be perfect and make no mistakes. The youth at the Tribe camp – an excellent evangelistic outreach with over a hundred kids involved – all expect the students of the Bible College to be somehow walking on water, and this is from people who know nothing about Christendom, how nothing about God and yet hold us to what is a higher account than we hold ourselves. To me this is an exceptionally high and tremendous expectation to live up to.

But we must realise and so must others that we as Christians are not perfect, and no we shouldn’t and simply can’t pretend to be, but I am starkly reminded that while I’m here behind the high stone walls of the College, God is judging me and so is the world and I must keep this in mind when I go about my life.

The worlds accountability of Christians to a higher standard, is an expectation that we perform no evil and that we allow no mess to ooze through our shining armour. It disturbs me how much this attitude has and is reserved in church to the detriment of addressing the real problems in our lives, and how Christians expect a Sunday morning to be filled with nice middle class people, who all look really nice and sound really nice, and do really nice things.

I’ve come to realise that the masks we wear is more of a pandemic in our lives, that we view them as some form of indespensible medication that we can’t dare be without.

Is this entirely a bad thing though?

If we take it an extreme, yes denial of ones or anothers ability to mess up is not a healthy mentality, but we must also understand that some people just can’t cope with the mess of others, but should we delude ourselves with a picture perfect landscape portrait of Christian perfection all around us?

Certainly not as it will never work, it will only to be shattered by the invisible flowing grapevine that so often accompanies mask, there’s always the hushed whispers wondering what exactly is underneath it.

Instead I like the way the church is moving, I heard recently from a man I respect and like that “Church is not for nice Christians, instead it is a Hospital for the sick.”

In Hospital, should you ever go there, doctors won’t cover you in a plaster pretending that you’re not ill, or that the wound that’s causing you so much pain doesn’t exist. So why do we do it, why do we cover it up? Why do we in church pretend that there are no wounds, and worse yet why do we rarely address them?

I think it’s because the church has forgotten how to deal with messy people, and I also think that we’re afraid to confront the truth at times, yet for some reason God still blesses us, how much more therefore would we be blessed if we actually tackled this issue over all of Christendom?

I believe God sees things we don’t, and I believe that God is waiting for his church, his body to change. But I wonder, if we all took our masks off would anyone then notice?