John Pavlovitz in his book A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community tries to get at this same disconnect. The description of the early church as we read about it in the book of Acts and in early historical records suggests that the community that sprung up in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection was so inspired and so counter the culture that it was noticeable. They were indeed a peculiar people in how they shared their resources and even wealth, how they cared for the poor, orphan and widows, how they gathered together and how they tried to live out of the last pictures they had of the Christ, serving breakfast on the seashore, washing dusty feet and dying to give life to others.
Pavlovitz says, “Today the church in America is ubiquitous. It is in danger of becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, and as a result it is also in danger of becoming extinct. It is Egypt. It is Babylon. It is Rome. The Church in so many ways has morphed into the very bloated, opulent, materialistic culture that Jesus calls us to live counter to. It has lost the beautiful oddness that made it so alluring to begin with, and as a result church leader spend so much time trying to figure out how to package and market Christianity to make it more appealing. Ironically, these efforts tend to make the church even more like the surrounding culture. Our worship services mimic entertainment, our facilities replicate coffee shops and conference centers, our organizations mirror corporate America, our leaders cosplay celebrity. It’s all become a variation on the theme. So many of the things that made the people of Jesus so decidedly strange in those early days are gone.”
We preach about how outrageous Jesus is but there is nothing outrageous or odd or hardly even interesting, about us.