Christian, the Reason So Many People are Losing Faith—May Be You

Thou shalt not steal. – God

Millions of people have lost their religion but they haven’t all given it up willingly. I think we Christians have stolen it from many of them.

They’ve looked at our body of work and found it far less than convincing. For all our loud, flowery talk of a God who is Love, we’ve repeatedly proven ourselves incapable of a worthy demonstration in close proximity—and so away they walk.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus dreamed out loud that the very lives of those who followed him would become brilliant beacons pointing to God; that our collective character would be the loudest testimony of God’s goodness in the world. We would incarnate Christ’s love to a hurting humanity in real-time, up close; and they in turn would seek the source of what they’d experienced—and find God there waiting.

Consider this a wake-up call, because that dream ain’t happenin’ with nearly enough regularity.