Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus || Spoken Word

There is a video going around that I've seen dozens of people post to Facebook, and it looks like it  is going viral among what I would call disaffected Christians. Tony Jones and others have weighed in on it as crap (my words not his) criticized its "false dichotomies" and its "demonizing of religion" but the reality is this video has struck a chord. I'll admit I personally cringe at a couple of the lines, but I also know that writing poetry is hard - and sometimes you have to take a bit of artistic license.

Part of it maybe the delivery, or the frenetic film style in which it was produced, certainly a poem on it's own would get less notice - but there is a message too, and that's what people like about it. Church seems to have left most of us behind - you can go to a gigantic consumer driven church, or a small dying church stuck in the 1950's, you can go to church to learn how wonderful you are, or how messed up you are; but there seems to be a missing middle ground between the  Michelle Bachmans and the Jay Bakkers. Church has been mainly focused on providing solutions for problems - salvation, morality, et. al. but there are many people caught in the middle, not willing to say that there  is no sin, and yet not willing to put on a plastic front of self righteousness. There is at its core the fundamental desire to struggle with my sin, my faith, my God because then, my theology is mine, built from a relationship and consciousness of the divine.

There is also sociological phenomena at play. We all have a tendency to look down on those we disagree with, and when left to our own devices, we have shown time and time again that we gravitate toward the programmatic, the replicable, the safe. We institutionalize that which has shown organic promise - we have methods and six simple steps - but people are hungry for more.

Most interesting to me is that this video seems to have struck a chord primarily with younger Christians - people still in the church. There are the disaffected in the pews! I personally struggle with convincing people within my own church that this attitude even exists, that it is not mere indifference that keeps people away, but rather intense personal passion which has no expression in either a stodgy atmosphere, or at a pep rally; and this may be the future of church.