The Jesus of Suburbia

I am reading through Mike Erre’s The Jesus of Suburbia. Wow! What a great and timely read this book is! It is a fairly light and easily understandable read, but it is not meant for the faint of heart. It is a piercing indictment of most of American Evangelical Christianity. So, if you are quite comfortable there, then you may want to take a pass on this one. It wastes zero time getting to the point too. The following excerpt is lifted directly from the third and fourth pages of the introduction:

My contention is this: Much of what passes for modern, Western Christianity isn’t of Jesus. We can (and do) lose Jesus right in the middle of prayer meetings and worship services. We can miss him in the Bible and in the church. As the Scriptures remind us, not all worship is pleasing to God, not all church services are intended by Jesus, not all teaching is sound teaching, and not all prayer is “in Jesus’s name.”

Is it because we have substituted human traditions for the teaching of God? Have we made our Jesus the Jesus of Christianity, not the Jesus of the Gospels? We may think we worship the Jesus of Nazareth, but in reality we worship the Jesus of Suburbia.

At first glance, the Jesus of Suburbia bears a resemblance to the real Jesus who walked the earth commanding his followers to deny themselves, bless those who persecute them, and love their enemies. But the real difference between the two becomes plain once we are actually asked to live that way, not just passively agree with the sentiments of the words.

The suburban Jesus would never be so offensive as to demand that we do what he says: he is more interested in the security, comfort, and prosperity of his followers. In short, much of the message of American Christianity presents Jesus as the purveyor of the American Dream.

Such a counterfeit can never stand against the real thing. Perhaps the church has been lulled into complacency by years of the very things we point to as proofs of God’s blessing upon America: religious freedom and material abundance. We have never really embraced the message and movement of Jesus Christ as a call to revolution. Instead, we have gotten comfortable with a watered-down, whitewashed, religiously safe version of him. Like many others, I have begun to realize my own idolatry and cowardice in this regard.

So far, the book is an excellent if not challenging read. Again, it’s not a comfortable read for the comfortable, but it is a correct one. I’ll continue to read through the rest of it, and post a few thoughts here and there. Funny, I’ve been saying the same thing as this author since 1998. I’m sure many, many others have been saying it too. I pray God’s Spirit continues to be with us all.