A gem from Robert Capon’s Between Noon and Three, pg 149:
If we are ever to enter fully into the glorious liberty of the children of God, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about freedom than we do. The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. It has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that it has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our pieces, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music but to avoid some flub that will get us in trouble. The church, having put itself in loco parentis (in the place of a parent), has been so afraid we will lose sight of the need to do it right that it has made us care more about how we look than about who Jesus is.
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Love this. Thanks.
I would guess that one church in a hundred gets this right. It continues to amaze me that so few people ever see through the nonsense of all our talk about freedom in Christ when popular Christianity in the USA is simultaneously loading up the burdens to shove into our hands each Sunday. God knows I got tired of leaving church with a spiritual to-do list in one hand and a “ways you’re missing the mark” list in the other.