There's a lesson there
Submitted by Jules on January 20 2002 13:14:34
In reply to The thread contains AI Watcher's story submitted by Forgiven on January 19 2002 12:33:19
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...not just that it's good not to have been brought up in a fundamentalist church, but also a lesson that we should be careful how we express Christianity to people like AI Watcher now, not to make it seem fundamentalist. It strikes me now reading his posts and yours (Forgiven) that there was a fundamental misunderstanding between him and you. You were saying, "This is what we believe to be true, and I'm telling you so that you can see where we're coming from." But he read it as saying, "This is what we believe, and I'm telling you to convince you that it's true." I think we need to be very careful to be clear what we're saying if we want to avoid being accused of 'preaching' at people who've asked not to be preached at. Another specific thing that was probably misunderstood was the use of the words "we" and "us". As Christians we're used to saying, "we're all sinners," meaning "all of us human beings." But he read it as saying "all of us boylovers are sinners," and so he took to be a moral judgement. I think that's why he reacted so sharply; he thought you as a Christian were making a moral judgement of him as a boylover, when in fact that's not what you were trying to do at all. Again, it's about being careful to double-check the intention of what we're saying. With people like this in the past, I found the best approach was to be very deliberately non-confrontational, and to go through all the things you agree with first. Having read his post at BC, I can relate to his feeling of joy; for me it was when I realised that being a Christian isn't about following a moral code that was made for a different culture and generation, but about the exciting challenge of living a morally virtuous life in our own culture and generation. Like him, I would also say "of course the earth is more than 6000 years old;" and so on. The difference is that for him that discovery also involved the rejection of Jesus as the Lord (or perhaps he had never been exposed to that side of it anyway?) whereas for me, that freedom is excatly what Christianity is about in the first place; our freedom in Christ is our freedom to work out how to live for ourselves rather than to be bound by any particular moral code. Must go now, but will join in again later... With love, Jules |
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