I have been working on a long form Christian testimony / advocacy on Eastern Christian theology paper, but I am a bit bogged down and realize that what I got is probably a bit too long for ordinary Blog and Facebook consumption, so giving a synopsis. My mother had a favorite saying "the proof is in the pudding" and used that to warn and chastise us kids (especially me) when we promised to do better (do better on future school tests, clean our rooms and so on). Unfortunately, that kind of logic cuts both ways. In my teen years, I would later use it as a rationale for leaving the Faith for a few years while in college because I realized that "Agape" love was something often talked about but rarely if ever practiced and I realized that my secular instructors in junior college and at the university, my martial arts instructors often were better than so much of my past experience at least compared to the Christian parochial schools I attended through most of my younger years.
This kind of insight also has a lot of relevance for things like Christian Evangelism. I think this is easier and more natural than what goes in much of the Christian world with revivalism etc. and will quote a passage from Protestant writer, Robert Weber's "Ancient Future Faith" to describe my point.
Robert Webber, Ancient Future Faith)
"During my seminary education, I never felt we really addressed the question: “What does it mean to be a member of the church” Later, when I turned to the early Christian tradition and began, for the first time, to understand what it meant to be a member of the body of Christ, it was like removing blinders that had covered my eyes.
I learned from the early Fathers that the church is intrinsically connected with Christ and his victory over the power of evil. The church is therefore to be regarded as a kind of continuation of the presence of Jesus in the world. Jesus is not only seated at the right hand of the Father, but is visibly and tangibly present in and to the world through the church. This is an incarnational understanding of the church. It is a unique community of people in the world, a community like no other community because it is the presence of the divine in and to the world. This concept of the church has specific relevance to the world of postmodernism.
. . . What this means for the church is that Christians must recover the primacy of being a Christian community. . . .
. . . the church is the primary presence of God’s activity in the world. As we pay attention to what it means to be the church we create an alternative community to the society of the world. This new community, the embodied experience of God’s kingdom, will draw people into itself and nurture them in the faith. In this sense the church and its life in the world will become the new apologetic. People come to the faith not because they see the logic of the argument but because they have experienced a welcoming God in a hospitable and loving community.
– Ancient-Future Faith, pp. 70-72"
