I’ll be honest, here—I suck at resolutions.  Most don’t last past Noon on New Year’s Day. The one to “eat better” died less than a minute after midnight in a Family Size bag of Doritos®. That said, there are some goals and things that must be accomplished before next New Year’s Day rolls around:

• Priority One is getting a job, since I only have just over a month or so of severance package left to live off of. Much longer, and I’ll be on the street. But at least I’ll still have health insurance.
• Secondly, a significant decision needs to be made about marriage and family. Do I keep fishing, or cut bait and move on? April will be a year since my wife left for her parents’ house, and I’m just about out of patience.  I think what makes me the most righteously indignant about the whole thing is that the “mentor couple,” who should be setting the example and know better, are letting her get away with what she’s doing.
• Make a decision about getting the virtual business off the ground.  Right now it’s a necessity—I need income. But what if I find a full-time job?  Do I keep it going?

One significant thing I’d like to do in my spiritual journey in 2008 is take a good, hard, close-up look at the first-century Church, and compare where we are in 2008 with where it was in its beginnings.  It was a very different Church then, and it seems we are so far away from where it began that I’m not sure we can call our current religious practice “Christianity” in its original sense.  People like Keith Giles, Rob Bell, and others in the emerging church movement are beginning to capture my interest with an integrative spirituality that is making more of a difference in such a short time than most of the mainstream church is able to do in years.  These are people who are digging into the scriptures and doing real exegesis, finding out what it meant to them in the first century before relaying that meaning from then to now.

My interest in Christianity at its foundations comes from a not-uncommon observation that I’ve noted in the past two and a half years (closing in on three years) of my recovery from pornography and sexual addiction. 

The observation is this: over these past few years, I would say that nearly all of the rejection, stigma, negative remarks, vindictiveness, etc., has come from those who claim to be Christians. Instead of being a hospital for the sick, we’ve become a country club where those who don’t fit in are thrown out.  We’ve put God in this box of how we expect Him to act and behave and anything that attempts to go outside that box is “not of God”—it’s like God’s in that box and we’ve relegated to Satan everything outside that box.  We’ve made God our butler, not our Lord.  I often find more personal acceptance from the non-religious community than I do from Christians.  It was never intended to be that way.

Observations like this have been driving me away from what most people call “church” this past year as I’ve continued my recovery journey. Places like Celebrate Recovery (where I volunteer full-time) have become “church” for me every week, because people that come are allowed to be not just Christians, but human beings with hurts, habits, and hang-ups.  We’re allowed to have time to let God work on those things instead of being forced into someone else’s cookie cutter.  People are accepted as they are, and then treated like the new creations in Christ they can become.  Because of that, people grow. People change. People don’t remain spiritually stagnant.  That, friends, is Church as I believe Christ intended it from the beginning.  We become salt that adds flavor rather than blandness.  We make a difference.

In balance, the scriptures we hold to as Christians definitely contain some absolutes and some basic foundations that are prerequisite to being called Christian.  But if we were to take a careful look, those prerequisites are actually very few.  We’ll find that the rest are things that we, like the Pharisees, have piled on top of that foundation over the years that, while they are generally in keeping with the Word of God and don’t contradict it, in reality have nothing to do with God’s intention and design for followers of Jesus Christ.  Not that everything we know as Christians is wrong, but that there is a lot of “fluff” that we need to take a serious look at in light of the scriptures and in light of how the church actually began.  This will be my personal and spiritual challenge this coming year. I want to know what being a follower of Jesus Christ meant to them in the beginnings of the church in order to understand what it should then mean to me.  I want to look at life—what are people truly, deeply searching for, and how can we as Christians provide that in a way that is meaningful and fulfills that basic human need?

My other challenge this year is to take a look at the rising tide of social media and find how we can integrate into not just our personal and social lives, but also into our spiritual lives.  The fact is that the world is rapidly changing, and we have to adapt in some way to what’s coming in order to remain effective at what we do.

Some New Year’s thoughts as 2008 gets under way via Seesmic.