welcome to the story.

Thoughts taken from Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian combined with my thoughts on the definition of salvation. How does the standard definition of salvation given by the modern world relate to the biblical defintion of salvation that God gives? Our current definition views salvation as getting across the line. Like a line in the sand. The most important thing in life is to be on the other side of this line. OK. People cross the line. What then? They try to get other people to cross the line. OK. What then? I see a huge contrast between crossing a line in this way, and following Jesus on a journey. It's as if we have taken what Jesus meant to be the starting line and instead turned it into finish line. The way most of us talk about "personal salvation" seems to persuade by exclusiveness. The argument says, "You, the 'unsaved', are on the outside and I'm on the inside." I'll tell you how to get inside if you want." We would be more in line with the gospel if we instead said, "God loves you. God accepts you. Are you ready to accept your acceptance and live in reconciliation with God?" The scope of salvation is so much bigger than an individual soul. Yes it is about the individual soul being saved but at its heart, salvation is about redeeming mankind as a community. It starts with an individual being saved, but it does not end there. The overarching heartbeat is the salvation of the world, not the individual. In the gospels, Jesus essentially told the people, "Your view of salvation is entirely too narrow. It is nationalistic. God's vision is global." Today in our present world, we've even managed to shrink it down even smaller than the nationalistic vision of the first-century Jews. For us today, it's not the salvation of a nation that God cares about; it's only the salvation of individuals. What if we thought of salvation in terms of becoming a part of the solution? What if we thought of "getting to heaven" as a by-product, not the main point of the story? What if we thought of the purpose of everything as being the glory of God, the pleasure of God not the salvation of individual souls? What if we thought that our identity not as an elite, saved for privilege, but ordinary people saved for service and responsibility? In fact, maybe the real enemy isn't hell, but instead living out of harmony with God, disconnected? Maybe salvation isn't something we "get" (as we've come to think of it) but instead salvation is what we experience and spread in the process of joining God in his grand mission. Maybe the focus moves from me to God, from my plan for myself to God's plan for the whole world. I don't know. These are just thoughts that like McLaren, I'm wrestling with.