WebJesus- NotReligion.com

Last week in my post on googling Jesus, Stephanie included a link to a site that’s communicating about Jesus well on the web, even if it’s not doing so in a way that launches it to the top of Google’s lists.

That site is NotReligion.com – It’s not about Religion–it is about a Relationship.”

I checked this site out and definitely found that it’s got some good stuff.  It speaks in a way that communicates to today’s emerging generation.  As you can see from their byline, “It’s not about relgion, it is about relationship”, it understands that people come with a bias against church and institution (in fact, that’s the focus this week on their website), but it communicates about relationship in a number of ways.   It’s focus is on the things that drive a person to think about God more- depression, family, anxiety, suffering, abuse, etc.  If you can help a person figure out how God fits into those, then you can start to connect them to faith.  I like a lot of the Bible studies on these topics. 

I do have a couple of criticisms of the site.  First, it does do the relatively standard evangelical steps into choosing relationship with Jesus.  Thus it falls into some of the pitfalls of decision theology, focusing people on their personal choice rather than God’s grace of seeking them out and bringing them to faith himself.  At the same time, it is prompting them to reflect and give the Holy Spirit space to work, so that’s good.

The second criticism is that in trying to reach people who are biased against the church, I’m not sure it helps enough in getting poeple to begin to move past that, even in the devotions currently on that topic.  We need to help people start to understand that while “religion” and “the church” may seem hypocritical or may have burned them in the past, they’re bigger than those problems.  Religion and church are precisely about relationships, and hopefully as we keep pushing that we can help people understand that some of their negativity isn’t with Church, but with individuals or the history of certain institutions.

Overall though good stuff and I appreciate the effort to communicate in a new and dynamic way.