JUST AS I AM WITHOUT ONE PLEA

  by adam harbinson

It's not easy to define spirituality, but perhaps Mike Yaconelli put his finger on it in his book 'Messy Spirituality' when he says, 'Sadly, "spiritual" has most commonly come to describe people who pray all day long, read their Bibles constantly, never get angry or rattled, possess special powers and have an inside track to God.’ And he goes on… ‘While that may be what most people think, I've come to see that such a view of spirituality is not only wrong, it's dangerous and destructive.'

The Pharisees of Jesus' day were spiritual. They were pious, knew all the rules and kept them. They were squeaky clean, politically correct - don't you just want to poke them to see if they're real! They tithed, read their Bibles and they prayed non-stop. They were sure they were spiritual, but they had no relationship with the God they thought they were serving, and that's what Jesus tried to communicate, and that's why they had him killed. Spirituality is all about relationship.

Let me tell you about Dean, a young man I met a while ago. He was on the platform of a youth outreach. Just over 18 months previously Dean was sentenced to three years in jail for 'borrowing' a car, something he seemed to do quite regularly. While in Bristol prison he met Dave, a forty year old, colourful character who had literally come up through the ranks and was now Prison Chaplain. Through Dave, Dean met Jesus, and his life was changed.

Now, if you were to ask me would you know that Dean was a Christian by the way he looked or talked, I'd have to say no. Indeed, as I was speaking to one of the organisers of the event I could just make out the words of a 'rap' Dean was performing in the background: 'No shit, God told me that/No shit, God told me that.' So when he had finished rapping, I asked him about his choice of lyrics, but he had no understanding at all as to why anybody would object. It was all he knew. To Dean, 'No shit' just means 'I'm telling you the truth.'

Now the point is this, they told me that between them they led over a thousand people to faith in Christ during Dean's time inside. He was brimming over with passion and enthusiasm. For the first time in his young life he was free from addiction and bondage, and all he wanted to do was to tell all who would listen and many who wouldn't about his newfound Lord - and people listened.

In the view of respectable Christianity, Dean would be more spiritual if he said 'Poo' instead of 'shit', but what right have you and I to decide that? The boy is out there doing the work, breaking moulds, tearing down barriers, demonstrating that relationship is what it's all about, not petty rules and regulations.

I've a notion that if you were to tell him that he was expected to clean up his language, wear a Sunday suit and stop smoking before he could witness to the transforming power of Christ, he'd probably not have bothered. Piously we sing, 'Just as I am without one plea' and we tell people that God loves them just as they are, but as soon as they enter the fold, we descend upon them from a great height. 'You have to stop this, and that, and yes, that too. You have to do this, go here, go there, dress like this,' and pretty soon they see through the hypocrisy of it all. They become another statistic; 73% of young adults in one of our main denominations vow they'll never be back. Are they all wrong?

Here's a test. How would you feel if a group of lads became Christians on a Saturday night and turned up in church on Sunday morning smoking their heads off, too hung-over to sit up straight?

'They're being disrespectful!' Really? Disrespectful to Jesus, or the irrelevant and misleading standards that Paul warns us about in his letter to the Colossians when he said, 'Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!' (Colossians 2)