What Does A Christian Look Like? (Part 1)

At this point, even Christians seem confused by the question...

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It was 1999. I was just shy of 16 years old. At the time, I was really trying to get into Christian ska and swing revival. One band, in particular, stood out from the rest, especially with regard to the latter musical style: The Ws. Their song The Devil is Bad still pops into my head from time to time.

Their music was happy. And most of it was rather benign and silly.

Little did I know how much influence one of their songs would have on my whole theology.

It is 2023. Today, Derek Webb shared a screenshot on his other social media channels of a tweet he had come across and responded to. And I shared his post because it really got me thinking, especially in light of his recent controversy over the song and video he recently released “Boys Will Be Girls” (You can watch the video at that link if you need some context).

Here is Derek’s post.

To a certain extent, I completely agree and relate to the sentiments expressed here. So many times, way more often than I think many would like to admit, Christians like to look at other Christians and judge them on how Christian they are or even whether or not they are Christians in the first place. They have sort of thrown out Jesus’ admonition to the religious leaders that whoever is sinless can throw the rocks first and replaced it with Paul’s counsel.

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”

A command that, I should add, Paul has taken directly from what we will later come to call the Old Testament.

There is a nice little trail we could follow here, discussing the seeming (or apparent, depending on how you feel about the Bible) contradiction here between Jesus telling the religious leaders not to judge and Paul telling the religious to indeed judge. And maybe we should go down this trail for a bit. But we are going to save that trip for another time.

My point here is that Christians have gone to great lengths to create a system that thrives on exclusion and judgment. Indeed, not all Christians are this way. And you know I am not saying they all are. But look at the movement or group as a whole. Or even look at a segment of the religion and you will see this push to exclude others being played out.

Their way or the highway (to hell).

I met a kid shortly after I graduated from college who was a few years behind me and he literally had this mindset. If someone did not believe exactly the way he did, they were flat-out going to hell. This kid is not an isolated case. Whole denominations are built on this idea, with lesser or greater severity.

And in seeking to keep people out, I think the church has missed a crucial teaching of Jesus, one that was really a lynchpin of his entire ministry.

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh.

I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. (John 10:16)

This is, I have come to believe, central to Jesus’ entire message. In fact, it was central to the entire foundation of the Christian movement.

One of the first things that happened after Jesus had come back out of the grave and then ascended to heaven was that, while the disciples were hiding from being arrested in an attic, the Holy Spirit shows up as a gust of wind and what look like “tongues of fire” (as the Bible describes them) come to rest on each person and they are given the ability to speak in foreign languages. It is like a positive spin on the Tower of Babel story.

In that account, the people decide they want to build a tower so tall that the whole world will know who they are. God looks down and sees what is happening and freaks out a bit. So they sort of reach down and confuse everyone by making them all speak different languages because, as God themselves state,

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (Genesis 11:6)

God does it again after the whole Jesus thing. Only this time, instead of doing it for the purpose of stopping a movement, they do it to continue one. Specifically, to bring into God’s care the sheep that are not already a part of the fold.

The idea is to include those who have previously been excluded.

To love those who have previously been unloved.

When I posted the tweet to my Facebook, I knew there would be some pushback. I wanted the pushback in this case. Because I felt a similar way as the responder. To quote part of his comment, “Membership of a group is determined within that group, not by non-members”.

Because, honestly, what do non-Christians know about what a Christian is supposed to look like? Which is only part of the problem.

Because you see, I think even Christians are confused on the matter of what a Christian is supposed to look like. To quote one of Derek Webb’s earlier songs,

There are two great lies that I’ve heard
The day you eat the fruit of that tree
You will surely die
And that Jesus Christ was a white middle-class Republican
And if you wanna be saved you’ve gotta learn to be like him…

The melding of Christianity with party politics has resulted in nothing more than a perversion of the gospel that Jesus was talking about and confusion, from those within and without, over what a Christian is supposed to look like.

The Ws were calling it out in 1999, and others were before them, and we just keep ignoring it.

Some people pound their Bibles
Waving them at their rivals
Just like in Paul's epistles
Our gentleness is evident to all

We throw the heathen into a panic
As we're bombing abortion clinics
While insisting to the cynics
They will know we are Christians by our love…