I don’t need to be fed. I need to be led. The former involves information. The latter involves risk. To be fed is safe. To be led is dangerous. To lead is the most dangerous of all.
I recently got an email from a friend I met a little while back. He asked me a question that I get asked a lot and that I hear others ask a lot and that I’m tempted to ask a lot.
“What books could I read to learn more about…”
Usually after the dot dot dot comes something along the lines of “following Jesus better, growing in my faith, etc.”
My answer is usually different depending on who’s asking me. If someone is brand new in their journey with Jesus it’s important to guide them towards the scriptures. This sounds obvious to people who are familiar with Christian spirituality, but to a new generation of normal Westerners it just isn’t.
But if you’ve known Jesus for a while you’ve been introduced to the scriptures for a while. Parenthetically, maybe that’s the problem. But that will have to wait for another blog.
So after I plugged my friends’ books [Erwin, Eric, Steve, Nancy and anyone else who has the courage to put their thoughts into concrete] I said to my friend something like this:
“I don’t know about books you should be reading, only risks you could be taking.”
Most people I know don’t need to read more books [including myself]. We need to change our lives.
Sometimes we need to stop learning and start risking.
I have several friends who stopped going to Mosaic because they weren’t “learning anything” from the teaching. I saw one of those friends just a week ago. She’s one of my favorite people and I’m always so happy to see her. She sheepishly explained that she was part of another faith community because she was actually learning something there.
She probably made a great choice, who knows? What I do know is that I don’t want my leaders to teach me. I want them to challenge me. I don’t care if I learn what the Greek says, or the 5 different theories about who wrote whatever. I don’t need to be challenged intellectually. That’s what the internet is for.
I don’t need to be fed. I need to be led. The former involves information. The latter involves risk. To be fed is safe. To be led is dangerous. To lead is the most dangerous of all.
So I keep listening to the leaders of Mosaic. Not because I haven’t heard it before but because I’m not living it yet. And we keep risking, not because we’ve learned it all but because it’s through risk that you begin to live what can’t be learned.
