Jennifer Thweatt-Bates is a doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is a regular contributor to a blog entitled afewvoices. She is also a member of Christ's Church for Brooklyn, our church plant. She wrote the following on her blog:

11 April 05

This post will be a little bit different. A little personal, and not “about” anything in particular. Just a reflection on where I find myself from time to time.

I often find myself using or thinking the phrase “Christianity at its best” when I am trying to articulate something about the Christian faith that I think is true, but often not observably true. Like, Christianity at its best proclaims peace. Or, Christianity at its best opposes racism. You get the picture.

Using this phrase is an admission of cynicism and hope at the same time. Christianity so often is not at its best. But there is something in Christian faith that resists being reduced to the distorted, imperfect forms of it that we see every day. Unfortunately, it’s the cynical end of this dichotomy that gets the most consistent affirmation. But every so often I get a glimpse of the best.

Every Sunday I take the train in to Brooklyn (it’s about an hour’s trip, then half an hour on the A train from Penn Station) to go to church. I go to a “house church” at the moment, for lack of a better term, which is actually a group of people from a much larger, more established church who decided to join together as a church-starting team. I like this group of people. That is pretty much why I’m there. I’m not “evangelistic” in any sense of the word that most Christians would recognize—my vocational mission work in China right after I graduated from college drummed that instinct out of me pretty fast. No, I’m there because there’s something about the people in this group that goes beyond labels and predictable attitudes and beliefs, something that really embodies what Christianity is, at its best.

Last night I sat in a living room and just listened. The topic was what the word “disciple” means, and what that word demands of people now. The discussion eventually centered on the thought, how do we accept and move beyond our own human need for security in a world where life is precarious? How do we look beyond our selves to others? This is a huge question, and we didn’t settle it. But it’s the right question for a group of Americans to be asking. It’s a step toward lifting our eyes from our Big Macs, our checkbook balances, our day planners and seeing that there’s something other than securing our own existence that we’re called to do. That something other isn’t contemplating our bellybuttons or lifting our eyes to heaven; it’s securing other people’s lives in this precarious world we all live in.

And then I realized, these people aren’t just discussing this; they’re living it, too. In this room was a guy who just returned from Rwanda, and whose wife is managing refugee camps in Sudan. An ESL teacher. A social worker. A midwife. Counselors, teachers, students, ministers. And children, who are growing up seeing Christianity at its best.

I realize this is a departure from the usual issue or news-oriented format, but I think maybe we all need a reminder that alongside all of the distortion and ugliness, the best exists as well.