Halfway Christians: The World Needs More From You
Growing up in the Liberian jungle, I found a lot to fear: the five-step mamba, the witch doctor, malaria, and the army ants that eat you when you sleep — to name a few.
That's why Liberians say, "Carry me halfway."
When the African sun dims and slowly fades into the dark jungle canopy and it's time to head home, Liberians always turn to their friends and quietly ask, "Carry me halfway."
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The request is relationally loaded. What they are really saying is:
The walk home will be so much sweeter with a friend.
And the truth is, it's getting dark and I feel afraid.
Come walk with me.
I don't want to walk alone.
Danger lurks in the dark. The boa constrictor hunts at night. So do the crocodile and leopard. And, of course, the Heartman with the machete — who wants your heart and soul for the Grand Devil — hides behind the palm nut trees in the swamp. Nobody wants to walk alone in the bush.
So a crowd of friends gathers to walk you home. But never just halfway — they say "halfway" only to be polite — they always walk you all the way home.
Halfway is never far enough. Halfway leaves us wanting.
The church does well carrying people halfway — spiritually. But for some reason, we seem to stop there, in the darkness, with the lights of home just barely visible in the distance.
We live spiritually underdeveloped and seem unaware of our own condition. Like infants trapped in adult bodies, we feed on milk, Paul in the Bible says, never nearing our full potential.
Something is strangely missing.
The widely respected Christian educator and scholar, James Fowler, has created a six-stage model of Spiritual Formation.
In examining Fowler's model (or using other, similar models), you might assume that most Christians do reach the upper stages of faith. Wrong. Not even close. Most Christian educators and theologians widely agree that a great majority Christians stop maturing at stage three — halfway.
People begin attending church and find comfort in the community, but then become stuck in the routine of tradition and simply stop growing, like a bonsai tree in a pot.
The evangelical church has turned comfortably numb with an incomplete — halfway — spirituality. We live in a stage-three world. And most troubling, we've become okay with that.
Why have we stopped halfway? Is it because this is all we know?
Maybe we have been conditioned to desire little more. We can spend a lifetime stuck halfway.
I believe I see what is missing most in the personal lives of Christfollowers and in our churches and theology classes: a deep, ardent passion for justice.
What is need today in our churches and theology classrooms is an unapologetic demand for justice. A genuine desire to see all people treated with equal dignity and respect regardless of race, nationality, gender, background, or any other factor — a sincere efforts to pull the poor up out of their poverty trap, a willingness to speak up and stand up for the marginalized oppressed, and God's people seeing their own life as His primary means of spreading justice in this word.
At the root of the problem is we separate spiritual formation from social justice.
In our Christianity of today, we tend to view these concepts as belonging in two separate arenas. Many evangelicals consider "doing justice" as a nice thing to tack on to our spirituality, a kind of afterthought to our spiritual formation — or else a pernicious proof of "works-based salvation."
For the most part we have made spiritual formation about personal piety a gospel of morality. If I don't smoke, don't curse, and don't watch too much South Park, then I'm doing pretty good at being a Christian.
That is not even close to what following God is all about.
What God is waiting for from all of us is a life brimming with compassion and justice.
When we fail to do justice an aspect of our spirituality remains dormant, undeveleoped.
When the ancients of Scripture spoke of authentic spirituality, they saw no separation between spirituality and justice:
Solomon — Speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice.1
Isaiah — Break the chains of injustice . . . set the oppressed free.2
Micah — Do justice, love mercy.3
Amos — Let justice roll like a river.4
Jesus Christ himself — Set the oppressed free.5
