It just doesn't seem credible does it?

How can anything with such an outdated moral vision and such a grim record of injustice possibly have any relevance today?

And how could there possibly be an all powerful God of love in a world like this? There's just no chance. And if, by some stretch of the imagination, there is a God out there somewhere, well, he had better have a good excuse.

Now at one level, as a Christian, you just have to sympathise with that. Bad things do happen to good people. And the Christian Church has often been a denial of its own message - entombing it beneath it's own agenda, or fossilising it into something institutional and static and remote.

But then, at another level, those objections are in danger of missing the point. Disasters and tragedies pose huge problems for us all, whatever our beliefs or ideology may be. And Christianity has never been about the church. It’s always been about Jesus. He is the issue.

And he is different. When the church gets out of the way long enough for us to see him, then what we see is liberating, humbling, awe-inspiring and satisfyingly counter-cultural. And when the church does get it's act together and begin to approximate what it is meant to be, then it demonstrates his love, adds credence to his message and models the world that will one day be.

Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, Christianity is not what it is so often assumed to be?