To many people, the church appears to be bland, anaemic, and gullible. According to a Christian Vision Project article by Mark Labberton, extracted from his book The Dangerous Act of Worship, there are many adherents to an anaemic image of Jesus, both inside and outside the church. Jesus has been made innocuous as a result of social, political, economic and spiritual accommodation.
Labberton says that when Jesus called the church to be the salt and light of the world, he “had in mind a community engaged in vigorous, self-sacrificing mission that goes to great lengths to enact costly love, that inconveniences itself regularly to seek justice for the oppressed, that creatively serves the forgotten, all to portray that the kingdom of God is at hand.” However, in most places, “that church seems to have gone missing.”
So how can the church stop appearing to be so bland? According to Labberton, the primary evidence of the power of the Good News “is meant to be the compelling, sacrificial love and justice vividly lived and humbly witnessed to by Christ’s body.” We have to abandon the small version of the Good News which makes us feel comfortable, and instead embrace the real thing.