What is your favorite kind of salad? Simple with iceberg lettuce smothered in ranch
dressing? A basic garden salad with tomato slices, cucumbers, and carrots
added? Or lots of ingredients like some kale, argula, spinach, cabbage, onions,
cheese, croutons, and a little vinaigrette drizzled over the top to bring out
each of the flavors?
“Church is like a salad,” declares Scot McKnight, one of
my favorite authors. Many of our
churches are rather plain iceberg lettuce salads, but church was meant to be a
unity of a variety of ingredients, worshipping and living life together. Is your church a mixed salad, a fellowship of
differents? Variety of genders and
marital statuses and ages? Variety of socioeconomic groups, races, and cultures?
Variety of music and artistic styles and forms of communication?
Scot McKnight says we should be going to church in our
own neighborhoods. If I were to go to the church nearest me, I would walk
across the street. I suspect it would be
just as much of a plain salad as the one we travel 8 miles to attend, if not
even more so, at least theologically, based on the denomination and my
observations of people in the parking lot. It’s kind of how people in the
suburbs live their lives in the Midwest and South. I likely would not find a socio-economically
or racially diverse church unless I went downtown.
In his book A
Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God’s Design for Life Together,
Scot McKnight shows the importance of church and what it is meant to be with
true community in diversity. Church
shapes how we understand the Christian life.
Too often, we prefer our own way – people just like us who like the same
style of music and hold the exact same theology and political leaning. But we miss out on so much when we stay in
our comfortable zone!
Love is the center of the whole Christian life – love for
God and love for others. Liberals and
conservatives, poor and rich, widows and singles and marrieds, Latinos and
whites and blacks, men and women, elderly and children – when we leave life
together, worship together, love each other, life gets a little bigger and a
little fuller, and we live the unity that Jesus prayed that we as His followers
would have. Scot McKnight shows us how
this is possible and why it is so important.
I highly recommend this book.
I was
provided a complimentary copy of this book from Zondervan Publishing in
exchange for my honest review.
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