“Keep Louisville Weird” was a bumper sticker I saw frequently the year my wife and I lived in Kentucky with our oldest son. The slogan pointed to something odd and eccentric about the city and its inhabitants; it reveled in the area’s strangeness and nonconformist impulse. Even if the campaign felt at times like it was trying too hard—as if it wanted to capture and brand the weirdness, to make it more consumable—I always liked the pride people took in the city’s personality.
Keeping a Strange Faith
The impulse to stand out, to stay strange, would serve the church well today. Too often, church leaders think the way to reach people or gain a hearing for Christianity today is to demonstrate our normalcy, to show that what we believe and how we live doesn’t fall too far afield from the mainstream. We can adapt the faith wherever necessary, especially in the area of ethics, where there seems to be a widening chasm between Christian and secular views of morality.
But Christianity’s strangeness is a feature, not a bug. Mystery is what draws us in. In a world that sees religion as just “being a good person” or a bit of spiritual inspiration for living your best life, we claim a crucified man from the first century got up out of his grave and is now King of the world, to whom everyone on earth owes allegiance.
Consider for a moment how foolish that must sound to the uninitiated. Foolish, but oddly compelling. Columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein says, “What I, as an outsider to Christianity, have always found most beautiful about it is how strange it is.”
Imagine visiting a church for the first time, with no background knowledge of anything the Bible teaches. You’d think it strange how much Christians sing about sacrifice, talk about God’s glory, or take comfort in the idea of being washed in the blood of a slaughtered animal. You’d find incredible the miracles described in the Bible. You’d raise one if not both eyebrows when you hear what Jesus teaches about money and possessions, sexuality and power. You’d marvel at the joy Christians feel at the thought of an execution stake where the worst torture takes place. Make no mistake: Christianity is strange.
I often chuckle at the following quote from classics translator, Sarah Ruden:
“Christianity arose when a small group of Jews became convinced that their leader, a poor and relatively uneducated man from the tiny town of Nazareth (a backwater of the backwater Galilee), whom the Romans had tortured to death as a troublemaker, had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, thus delivering mankind from sin and death—and that this was the point of all existence in the universe. As unscientific as it makes us seem, I and two billion-plus other people say, ‘of course.’”
For 2,000 years, people have been hearing this strange and exciting “good news”—the gospel—and have found their lives transformed as a result. And the desire for everyone in the world to experience God’s forgiveness and love motivates our obedience.
Peculiar People
Many people think the whole point of religion is to find a God who affirms the general direction of our lives and doesn’t say or do anything too unexpected, a God who doesn’t ask too much of us, a God who is easygoing and empty of all mystery. And there are many who believe the way for the church to grow is to show everyone just how “in step” we are with the culture around us. If we can just show everyone that we’re not so different, that we’re not so out of step with the times, then we’ll gather more people. We just need to show people how culturally relevant God is, how common, normal, and reasonable the gospel is, and people will join us.
There’s a place for offering rational reasons to believe in Christianity, of course. God wouldn’t have us check our minds at the door of the church. But let’s not forget it’s the strangeness of God that draws us to him. It’s not because God is just like us that we want to draw near but because he’s so different, so holy, so separate, so weird. And yet this God, in all his majesty, took on flesh. What could be more astounding than what J. I. Packer described as “the babyhood of God”?
It’s not what’s normal that attracts attention but what’s abnormal, what’s strange and fresh. If we give up essential truths of the Christian faith in order to be culturally relevant, we make ourselves eternally irrelevant. We make the church boring. The world needs a church that does more than offer an echo of our own times.
Are You Strange Enough?
I realize it’s possible to seek strangeness for its own sake, to revel in the peculiarities of the faith as if they’re just a fashion statement to help us stand out from our peers. This kind of weirdness becomes just another consumeristic brand that leaves the allegiance of our hearts untouched.
In contrast, the early church writings (like the Epistle of Diognetus) describe Christians in ways that stress their strangeness and their ordinary, commonplace goodness as citizens. What’s necessary is a mix of the commonplace and the strange; only then does Christianity both stand out and remain comprehensible to the modern world.
Still, I think the bigger challenge today is that we don’t stand out enough. And so we must ask some questions.
Is there enough strangeness in your life?
Is there enough in your life that would make you compelling to the people around you who don’t follow Jesus?
Is there anything different about your life that would attract attention? How you spend your money? How you spend your time? How you live morally? How you engage the world? How you forgive?
Standing out draws attention, not fitting in. Let’s keep Christianity weird.
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