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For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it
Luke 9:24 (NIV)
I have a tendency to oversimplify things. Some people say I’m a compulsive summarizer. So with those two confessions out of the way, I want to—no, I have to—summarize a couple of things that relate to this issue of Conversations.
First, I believe that a primary reason for one of the darkest times in Church history (the first church split—1054 A.D.; over 1,000 years after Jesus prayed, “May they be one, Father…”) was the two competing operating systems that dominated Christian thought at the time: the Greek East and the Latin West.
While I’m aware that geographic, political, and linguistic strains had been fraying the connective tissue of the body of Christ for centuries; I believe the Great Schism was also a result of two very different approaches for processing theology. The Eastern mind-set seems more like a Mac computer. The West used PCs.
Now of course, they didn’t really use computers; neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates had been invented yet. What I am trying to say is that the Eastern way of viewing God seemed more at home with user-friendly icons and featured a simpler, big-picture focus. Not to mention, the color graphics package was out of this world.
By contrast, the MS-DOS system of the West had a penchant for capturing spiritual things using an Excel-spreadsheet type of approach. The Western church seemed to employ more of a logical, left-brain method for systematizing God. The tragedy—it occurs to me as I type these words using Microsoft software for my Apple computer—is that putting both together would have been much better.
What does that have to do with this issue of Conversations? I recently discovered that I have a major problem with the operating system of my soul—and now I’m talking about something much more fundamental than Mac vs. PC.
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And holy obedience must walk in this world, not aloof and preoccupied,
but stained with sorrow travail .
Thomas R. Kelly
The Jesus Way conference was over, and I was relaxing with my wife at a riverside café in San Antonio. Being an introvert who had been awash with waves of people for three days, I just wanted a quiet place to dry out for a while before heading off to the airport.
But our tranquility was soon punctured by a mariachi band that began playing at a table nearby. We elevated the volume of our conversation, and I carefully avoided eye contact with the lead minstrel. The last thing I wanted at that moment was to be an audience of two for one of their loud songs.
