a month of sundays?

I was doing my usual blog browsing and noticed a story on Pastor Eugene Cho's blog about a story done recently by a free local weekly newspaper, The Stranger. The story, titled "A Month of Sundays", involved a group of 31 writers being sent out to local Seattle area churches to "review" them. As expected of writing one might find in The Stranger, the reviews were a mixture of funny comments, no-holds barred criticism, and a bit of unintentional social commentary. One got the sense that the writers were competing with each other to see who could write the biggest gag lines for laughs.

Pastor Eugene's comments on the story are pretty on point and definitely worth a read... his post even got a hat-tip on the official The Stranger blog, SLOG.


.:.


The Stranger article reminded me of the story of Hemant Mehta, AKA "the eBay atheist", who in exchange for an auction of his "soul", agreed to attend church. A Christian organization, off-the-map.org, ended up winning the auction and asked Mehta to write reviews of the services he attended.

Anyway, as a Seattle-ite, a cynical writer, and a person who likes to think of himself as a progressive Christian, I thought the article's premise was good even if the execution was a bit sloppy. Modern day Christianity in America ought to examine itself a lot more than it does, and your average, everyday folks who just so happen not to go to church definitely are a source of insight.

Sadly, Christianity in many ways has become an insular and unfriendly (some would even say belligerent) culture to non-believers... people claiming to be Christian ought to be working harder to reform that.