Why a blog called “the naked church”?

Here in the Bible Belt, Christianity is most often clothed in the garb of moralism, a dead, external codex of behaviors: don’t drink beer, don’t go to see R-rated films, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t wear tatoos or piercings, don’t have sex outside of marriage, wear a suit to church, worship to organ music, pay your tithe and your taxes, and vote Republican and you’re a Christian in good standing, at least in the eyes of much of the Bible Belt.

Plenty of younger people who were raised in the church were fed a steady diet of these do’s and don’ts (mostly don’ts) and when they got old enough to make their own decisions decided they could do without them. And so they rejected Christianity, or at least what they thought was Christianity.

In truth, what they’ve rejected is a dead outer husk that may or may not have had the living gospel inside. I’ve already gotten ahead of myself though — some of you are already thinking, “Gospel? What’s that?” Some of the others of you are already thinking that I’ve pretty much already described what you thought was the gospel — the list of behaviors that constitute morality as it is often preached here in the central south.

The effect of this has been inoculation. A family friend who has a graduate education in microbiology will surely be able to expose all of the wrong details in the analogy I’m about to press, but I’m going to do it anyway. If you take a living virus which consists of a fairly inert protein coat around a core of living genetic material and evacuate the genetic material from inside it (I think many virii have RNA instead of DNA, the difference being that the former is unzipped down the middle) what you have left is the dead shell of a virus. Inject that into your body and expose yourself to the dead outer coat of the virus. You won’t get the disease, but you will be inoculated since your body will develop antibodies against the protein coat of the virus — your body rejects the dead shell of the virus, and is inoculated and immune if you are subsequently exposed to the living virus.

Bible belt morality is like that. It’s the dead shell that the gospel – the living part of Christianity – is often covered in. Some churches have lost the living part altogether and all that’s left is some dead form or another. Young people who have been exposed to the dead externals of Bible belt moralism or perhaps a dead church tradition have often rejected it, and rightly so – I join you in rejecting that sort of thing.

But what I’m really hoping is that having been inoculated to these dead externals, perhaps you aren’t completely jaded and immune to the living gospel. I hope to build a community of faith in Christ, where the dead skin has sloughed off and what’s left exposed is the beauty and vitality of Jesus incarnated in the lives of believers who are passionately in love with life and with him — a naked church where there is no artificial obstacle between us and the living gospel of Jesus.

There is another side of this blog title as metaphor — a naked church is where we can lower the masks we usually hide behind and be real in front of one another. A naked church is an authentic church, an intimate church — not in a sexual sense, but spiritually.

Is this making sense? I hope so. Check back and let me know. I’ll be stopping in regularly to talk about the journey that’s brought me here, and the ongoing process that is always unfolding.