How Safe is Your Discipleship?

I have always enjoyed Mark Galli's insightful comments. Here he touches on our discipleship and how safe it is. Is discipleship a safe venture? Reminds of Chronicles of Narnia where it was asked, "Is Aslan a tame lion?"

SOULWORK

Danger: God

What should we think about a deity who gives us sticks of dynamite to play with?

Mark Galli | posted 8/13/2009 10:08AM

Back in the early sixties, a book was published with the title, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches. I never read it, but it strikes me as an apt description of American Christianity, and a mirror image of the unnerving God of the church.

The suburbs are not the incarnation of social evil, as some critics would have us believe. But they do tend to shape us (as does the city, as does rural life!). And some of that shaping has not been for the church's best.

Let's take one famous quality of suburban life: safety. I live in a suburb in the Midwest where the biggest news items in the police blotter in our local paper usually have to do with shoplifting or DUIs or the occasional bicycle theft. Murders, rapes, armed robberies and the like—few and very, very far between. It's a safe place to live. Safe is good.

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