Now we live right next to neighbors who work miles apart from ourselves at different times. Travel is easy. Even the poor are rich. Community is with fellow workers at work rather than your neighbor next door or at church if you go. There are too many people to be able to know everyone. We don’t see need even next door to know to give. It’s hard to just give to a cause with faceless recipients.

I could go on about things in theory, but I’m very intrigued by the why we’re not a “peculiar people” anymore. What has changed? Why has it changed?

Is it unity? Or individualism? Consumerism? Is it that we aren’t on the same page about God’s mission and the purpose of the Church? Is it too easy to be a “Christian” that it has lost the sacrifice and selflessness that earlier Christians so readily grasped and demonstrated?

I read passages like this and the one that Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria in 260 wrote that speaks of the Christians’ selfless acts during the great epidemic, and I’m so convicted and wonder about my “brand” of Christianity and if it is too easy, or if there is a “balance” to it…. When I read accounts like this, there is no balance. Common sense says to stay away from sick people, not go to them, care for them and risk life. Common sense tells me to save for retirement and provide for my own family, yet in this account of the early Christians, they shared everything and selflessly gave, sparing nothing.

It is crazy and radical. And difficult and…….. is it actually possible? Must we really interpret Christ’s words literally….. that we must lose our life to find it? Is it really supposed to be literal?

In S. Michael Craven’s book Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Contextualized Christianity, on the last page he writes, “If we want to overcome our culturalized Christianity to worship and serve the King of kings, we must recover this broader understanding of our mission as Christians in the world. We must learn to properly analyze and intelligently engage the culture, and we must interact with each other and the world in a spirit of grace, love, and charity. The church in America must repent of its radical individualism and independence that separates us from the community of Christ and once again humbly submit to one another. This we must do if we ever want the world to know whose disciples we really are.” (page 201)

Even if more Christians were to live in sacrifice and community as the early Christians did, would they be seen as an anomaly or taken as a defining characteristic of what it means to be Christian? Because right now, it seems that “being Christian” oftentimes doesn’t really mean much, and I’m still figuring out what it actually means, even after a whole series about this at my church!