Who do you say I am?

Training up a child

Growing evidence, both anecdotal and research-based, appears to support what listeners have been hearing in conversations on the Unbelievable? podcast and Justin Brierley’s “Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” : that we may be witnessing a surprising (and welcome) return of belief in God. Bible Society’s The Quiet Revival report, drawing on YouGov polling, argues that church attendance in England and Wales has risen significantly in recent years, challenging the assumption of inevitable decline. 

It is both an answer to prayer and a call to action. Are we prepared for a baby boom of believers? While it’s easy to be smitten in the delivery room with a new spiritual life, Christian parenting begins outside the birthing centre, as that nascent belief works out its salvation with fear and trembling. Are we prepared to adopt these infants into God’s family and train them in the way they should go, or will we fail to nurture them and allow the cultural village to raise them as spiritual orphans?

Recipe for disaster

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of witnessing the birth of belief. Still, we must temper that enthusiasm by acknowledging our past complicity in fostering a generation of “nones.” As we gather data on the reasons for renewed interest in God, let’s not forget the rationale of those who now find Him irrelevant, lest we repeat the same parenting mistakes.

Notably, this renewed interest is showing up not only in surveys but at the tills. In the UK, industry reporting has highlighted significant recent growth in Bible purchasing (against a flatter wider book market).  And in the United States, Circana BookScan-tracked reporting has similarly pointed to a notable rise in Bible sales in 2024 (with continued strong sales thereafter). 

People who leave their faith often cite the church’s hypocrisy, arrogance, rigidity, and lack of intellectual depth as reasons for their departure. Interestingly, among all the reasons mentioned, Jesus isn’t one of them. In fact, every other religion, rather than reject the cornerstone, uses Him as a decorative rock to make their infrastructure more appealing. Hindus claim Him as an avatar and add Him to their expanding divine shopping list. 

Buddhists number Him among the Bodhisattvas who prefer to postpone their entry into Nirvana to help others secure a similar afterlife stay. New Agers give Him the honour of being the most remarkable example of God consciousness. Islam makes Him a card-carrying prophet. And even atheists welcome Him as a social justice warrior. Sadly, while most people are drawn to Jesus, they find His church repulsive, a sentiment echoed by Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

While we can understand why they would dislike Christians, we want to know why they like Christ. Sadly, the Jesus they admire is a figment of their imagination, not found in the Bible, the only historically reliable book we have about Him. You may not like Christians, but they are the only ones who legitimately possess the owner’s manual. You can question their ability to read it, but you must acknowledge that if you want to meet Jesus, you have nowhere to look but in Scripture.

Our apologetic should therefore begin by helping others see that if they want to taste and see that He is good, they must follow the authentic Jesus recipe found in the New Testament and resist the temptation to add or subtract from His ingredients to suit their cultural tastes. This concern is not new; the early church recognised that failing to follow scriptural instructions was a recipe for disaster. 

Ignatius of Antioch articulated this concern in a letter to the Trallians in 110 A.D. “For those people mingle Jesus Christ with their teachings just to gain your trust under false pretenses. It is as if they were giving deadly poison mixed with honey and wine, with the result that the unsuspecting victim gladly accepts it and drinks down death with fatal pleasure.”

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Have I been with you so long? 

It is not only other religions that are guilty of accessorising Jesus; we Christians have also been known to give Him a fashion makeover and dress Him up as our denominational poster boy. We often treat Him like a ventriloquist’s puppet who mouths the church’s words rather than listen to Him call us out for our hypocrisy. We also occasionally reduce Him to religious entertainment reserved for tithing customers, forgetting that He is the doorman who paid the price of entry for anyone willing to stand in line at the narrow gate.

John warned us this would happen in the opening chapter of his Gospel.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. (John 1:10-11)

The disciple Philip famously asked Jesus, “Show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus, disappointed, replied, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The Father came to His children, but they didn’t recognise the striking family resemblance to His Son. Philip may have had an excuse, having known Jesus for only about three years. We, however, are without excuse, since the record of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection has been with us for two thousand years. Why is it that, after all this time, it still seems we don’t know Him?

Since Jesus is universally admired, getting Him right is essential to a compelling apologetic. I think the church is guilty of making Jesus less accessible by overemphasising certain aspects of His character at the expense of others. The three most troubling trends are our tendency to abstract Him, deputise Him, or transform Him into a counter-cultural hippie. Let’s take a look at each one and see how they obscure the real Jesus.

Thought experiment

Jesus is a bit demanding when He is allowed to roam free, so we abstract Him so that the only threat He poses is the headache we get from overthinking Him. We transform Him from a saviour into a syllogism, and rather than work out our salvation with fear and trembling, we calculate it with logic and reason. We take His life, death, and resurrection, distil them into pure doctrine, and, like bartenders, pour out drinks sparingly to the faithful. We make it harder to join God’s family by adding academic fine print to God’s adoption paperwork.

Ironically, the God of the universe emptied Himself and entered our world, but instead of embracing Him, we hand Him a return ticket. God goes to all the trouble of incarnating, and yet we find His physical presence a bit intimidating, so we disembody Him.

Jesus told us, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). We find this statement a bit messy, so we abstract Him for intellectual consumption by replacing His broken body with a collated theological corpus and His spilled blood with dried academic ink.

When we abstract Jesus, we distance ourselves from Him. In those moments when we most desperately need to feel His presence, we find only a disinterested academic phantasm. Jesus isn’t an intellectual exercise; He is the logos made flesh, whose scars remind us that the life He offered on our behalf wasn’t a thought experiment.

Deputising the Son of Man

I find that many churches worry that Jesus is a bit too friendly and forgiving. They fear He will undermine their efforts to call out the sin in the world by going soft on crime. They worry the Lion of Judah may be a pussycat. They prefer the fireworks of the Mighty Oz to a wizard whose veil was torn and who now gives broken people courage, compassion, and comprehension. So they remove His crown of thorns and replace it with a periwig, hand Him a gavel, and escort Him back into the Holy of Holies so He can catch up on the backlog of original-sin violations He failed to adjudicate while hanging on the cross.

They want a God who is “holier than thou,” but forget that holiness means “set apart,” and nothing sets the Christian God apart more than power found in weakness, laying down one’s life for another, and loving one’s enemies.

Jesus said He came to serve, not to be served, yet the church prevents Him from waiting on tables. We are called as Christians to take a knee in His presence, but we must also be willing to let Him leave the throne room to wash some feet.

Our intentions may be pure. We may be concerned about throwing divine pearls before human swine. We may want to avoid sullying God’s reputation by keeping Him away from the riffraff, afraid that He may be called a glutton and a drunkard if He is found hanging out with tax collectors and sinners. (Matthew 11:19)

Jesus, however, will have none of it. The veil was torn. So why do we keep stuffing Him back into the Holy of Holies to protect Him from the world He came to save?

I have seen firsthand the consequences of emphasising God’s wrath, especially for children. God becomes a tyrant who gives the prodigal son a good tongue-lashing instead of throwing a party to celebrate his return. God is depicted as perpetually wagging a scolding finger at us rather than showing us the scars of no greater love. Jesus is deputised to round up all the guilty suspects, when in reality He died to release us from captivity.

To my brothers and sisters in Christ who fear that emphasising a relationship with Jesus is courting moral laxity, that letting Jesus into our hearts without the proper doctrinal paperwork leads to an emotionally labile Christianity,  I want to assure you that, despite being a friend of sinners, He has never been afraid to bring the heat and speak of an unquenchable fire. Jesus had no problem turning up the volume on the law by equating lust with adultery and anger with murder, calling out religious hypocrites for their performative practices, and overturning a table or two. Jesus’s message wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns but included a fair amount of weeping and gnashing.

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Make Love not War

The final strategy avoids the pitfalls of either banishing Jesus to a professor’s study or locking Him in a judge’s chambers, but it has its own problems. It portrays Jesus as a hippie guru who values feelings over reason and believes the world would be a better place if we made love, not war. Jesus becomes a free-thinker who treats morality as a set of guidelines rather than a strict code. A postmodern nonconformist who rejects authority and reinterprets truth. A cultural trailblazer who instructs His followers to navigate life with a compass that points only to emotional North.

Faith becomes a Grateful Dead concert where you trip on the spiritual improvisation of heterodox Merry Pranksters, encouraging you to turn on to Jesus, tune in to His feelings, and drop out of traditional Christianity. A flower-child Jesus who blossoms during the summer of love but is nowhere to be found when we enter the winter of our discontent. A fair-weather friend who is the life of the party but a no-show at the inevitable wake. The problem with this form of “Christianity” is that the Jesus being advertised looks nothing like the Saviour found in Scripture. Jesus said He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, so if you want to be a Christian, there are no detours, no alternate destinations, and safe arrival can be guaranteed only if Jesus is in the driver’s seat.

All-Season Saviour

Jesus isn’t a theorem, a magistrate, or a deadhead. He is the Logos made flesh. He is the Judge who takes our punishment. He is the friend of sinners who finds their lifestyle unacceptable. Jesus’ identity can be summarised on the cross, where God’s justice meets His no greater love as He lays down His life for us while we were still sinners. It is for this reason that Paul could confidently sum up the gospel this way:

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

I suspect that during this recent Christmas season, most of you heard the oft-repeated maxim “Jesus is the reason for the season.” While a helpful reminder, it treats Jesus like a seasonal worker, like Santa and the Easter Bunny, who are unemployed the rest of the year. Jesus, however, doesn’t just make a guest appearance in a nativity or pop in for a cameo on a cross. He is an all-season Savior who promises to always be with us to the end of the age.

Exit interview

I would argue that the problem with Christianity isn’t Jesus but the church’s failure to introduce the world to Him. People inside the church need to do a better job of putting Jesus front and centre, while those outside the church need to stop using the religious hypocrisy of His followers as an excuse for not answering the door when He knocks.

When we make Christianity about Christians rather than Christ, the metric becomes the laity rather than the Lord. This is a convenient way out for those who know that Jesus is asking far more of them than they can deliver, and an excuse for those who prefer that the light of the world not shine in their darkness. Since Christians are often chameleons but Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, it would seem a better apologetic strategy to introduce people to the Shepherd before we promote the benefits package that comes with joining the flock.

Christians often distinguish people as in or out of the fold, which, sadly, emphasises allegiance to the group rather than to Jesus, an unfortunate way of thinking that makes the church’s behaviour more important than the God they worship. Preston Ulmer, in his book “The Doubters Club,” makes this very point when he writes:

“Rather than seeing people as in or out, what if we started seeing people by their degree of distance from Jesus?”

The power of Ulmer’s observation is that it gives us a well-defined apologetic goal – moving people closer to Christ. It avoids the pitfalls of teaching people to hit a moving denominational target and instead focuses their attention on making a Jesus bull’s-eye.

The decision to be a Christian should centre on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, not the exploits of His followers. It is about the One we worship, not the company we keep. He is a Christian. So, before you blame Christians for your decision to leave the church, you need to clearly state what it is about Christ that you find so detestable. You must submit to an exit interview in which the only question you need to answer is the one posed by Jesus Himself - “Who do you say I am?” To answer that question correctly, you must open scripture and do a WORD search.

Jesus said you would find Him in the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the stranger, and the prisoner. So if you were expecting to encounter Him in a church filled with well-dressed, law-abiding citizens who know each other by name and make sure everyone has their fill of after-service coffee and cookies, then maybe you’re looking for Him in all the wrong places. Once you have found Him, however, you should share your experience with others in a church setting, always keeping in mind that Christ comes before community, so that even when the flock strays, you will always recognise the voice of the Shepherd.

Full disclosure

I worked for several years with men in the final phase of the addiction recovery programme at the Union Gospel Mission (UGM) and heard many stories of how Jesus transformed their broken lives. Sadly, after these men completed the programme, the joyful anticipation of one day occupying a room prepared for them by Jesus was replaced by hand-wringing over the legalese of the denominational lease agreement they had to sign before moving into a church home. The prodigal son, who had just been welcomed home by his Father with open arms, was now forced to attend a church run by the older brother, who believed that the number of hours in a creational day, the filioque, or speaking in tongues, determined one’s fealty to Christ. I would challenge both those who refuse to enter a church because they don’t like the congregants and those who want to abandon their church seat because of the hypocrisy of their pew mates to sit in a folding chair at a UGM graduation ceremony and encounter the real Jesus.

Religious and irreligious alike agree that there is something about the name of Jesus. Therefore, He should be the starting point for all our evangelistic and apologetic efforts. We must, however, present the Jesus who is, not the One we want Him to be. We don’t get to retrofit, mould, or reinterpret Him to fit our religious narrative. We must look to the Bible, where the Word leaps off the pages. Jesus is the Author of our faith, so let’s not hand the world an abridged version. We need to be committed to complete transparency and release the Jesus files without redaction so everybody will know the TRUTH.

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who practiced neonatal medicine for more than 20 years and has written three apologetic books. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com