Christians can be Mean

I read this in Renovation of the Heart this morning and it rang true to me, not in a finger pointing way, but because this is part of who I've been in the past, and still have pieces of this in me:

A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the Western church, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to heaven. it aims to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people.

Now , the practice thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with one another, much less those "outside". Often their most intimate relationships are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness and resentment. They have found ways of being "Christian" without being Christlike.

As a result they actually fall far short of getting as many people as possible ready to die, because the lives of the "converted" testify against the reality of the life that is life indeed. The way to get as many people into heaven as you can is to get heaven into as many people as you can - that is to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation or full-throttle discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being.

On the flip side, I've been coming to understand what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in a way I never had before, in a way that is changing me in ways I didn't know I could be changed. I've still got a long ways to go.