Sweet and Brantleys Sweet Sweet Qoutes

I found a couple of good qoutes on my friend Mike Brantleys Blog, one from himself and one from Len Sweets book "The Gospel According to Starbucks"

Len Sweet Says:

"Organised religion has been assuming that because it has a better product - namely, God - that it simply needs to open the doors and customers will line up. That assumption no longer holds. Christians have much to learn about faith as a lived experience, not a thought experiment. Rational faith - the form of Christianity that relies on argument, logic, and apologetics to establish and defend its rightness - has failed miserably in meeting people where they live. Intellectual arguments over doctrine and theology are fine for Divinity School, but they lose impact at the level of family life experience. Starbucks knows that people live for engagement, connection, symbols, and meaningful experiences. If you read the Bible, you'll see that the people of God throughout history have known the same thing. Life at its very best is a passionate experience, not a doctoral dissertation. The problem is not that Christianity can't be believed, but that it can't be practiced because of its lack of lived experience. And it can't be observed by others because there are too few Christians who are radical enough to manifest what the Gospel really looks like."

I'm struggling with this, knowing that its not all about propositions, who's right between arminians and calvinists, whos right about the shape of church, whos wrong about some issue of theology. I am slowly learning, and having it knocked into me that its all about knowing Jesus, following Jesus with my whole being, listening to the aches of his heart. I know this means me humbly rereading the gospels, rereading them and letting Jesus speak to me, truly asking what it means for to me to be a follower.

Mike Brantley comment at the end of his post states:

"We get the constant question, "how do we begin the spiritual conversation". We don't. We simply posture (our attitude, desire and actions) scream we love you, enough to sacrificially care for and bless you... The rest comes to us."

As Christians we need to get back to the simple yet radical message of Jesus's Love for the world. The only way we can do this is by living what we beleive and know, loving the lost and posturing in a way that will reach them, listening, talking, and offering our time to those who need it. As Michael Frost says in one of his sermons "Our job is to be the best freinds to those around us they ever had." Posturing in this way we are willing to give up all for those around us, because show true love means that. We are saved by grace so that we can truly change the world, we have in our hands the most compelling story ever told, our job is to tell it with our lives.