Newsweek Magazine has chosen this Holy Week to feature a cover story with a picture of Jesus dressed in denim with a crown of thorns on his head, standing in the middle of a busy North Amercian street, gazing piously up to heaven.

The headline blazoned beneath the figure of Jesus, suggests the reader “Forget the Church: Follow Jesus”. This advice does not appear in the article. It is the product of the headline writer hoping to appeal to readers jaded with any form of institutionalized religion. The author of the article is in fact a devout Roman Catholic.

Andrew Sullivan has remained faithful to his church. But it has not been an easy or a comfortable relationship. He has not stayed quietly or submissively. Sullivan rages against his church and almost all contemporary manifestations of Christianity in North America today.

Although Sullivan writes pointedly from the perspective of a Christian in the United States, his critique of current institutionalized Christianity is a powerful challenge to all people of Christian faith around the world. We who find our faith sustained in an institutional expression of Christianity need to listen to Sullivan and pray for guidance to respond wisely to his call.

Sullivant begins by describing the process by which Thomas Jefferson went through the New Tesatment and cut out those parts of the Gospels he believed represented Jesus’ true teaching. It is not an exercise Sullivan entirely favours, but it resulted, he suggests, in a vision of Christian faith with which Sullivan has some sympathy. Jefferson discovered that

Jesus’ doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching. That’s why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.

Andrew Sullivan goes on to issue a stirring challenge to Christians to recover an empahsis on living the teachings of Jesus, rather than demanding conesnt to a series of abstract doctrines.

Whether or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus’ divinity and resurrection—and in the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday—Jefferson’s point is crucially important. Because it was Jesus’ point. What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand?

He then goes on to offer the life of St. Francis of Assisi as a shining example of a person who lived faithfully the doctrines of the Christian faith.

Sullivan concludes by admitting that he is not sure how the church can be liberated from its present bondage to forces that he believes fall far beneath the ideals of Jesus. But Sullivan does suggest some strategies he believes will not work.

I have no concrete idea how Christianity will wrestle free of its current crisis, of its distractions and temptations, and above all its enmeshment with the things of this world. But I do know it won’t happen by even more furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God.

It is difficult to avoid the fact that something is seriously wrong in much of institutional Christianity today. Andrew Sullivan’s litany of complaints is too compelling to deny.

As we in the church walk with Jesus in this Passion week, along the painful way of the cross, it is to be hoped that we might choose to die to those abuses in our life together that have earned such disrepute for those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ.

We cannot live in community without some form of institutional embodiment of our communal identity. Even Francis of Assissi had to suffer the pain and struggle of communal life as his followers increased in number. But, if the institutions which for some of us have been a source of light and spiritual nourishment will not be reformed, they must be allowed to die.

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For anyone with an interest in the current state of religious life in the west, Andrew Sullivan’s article should be read in its entirety at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/andrew-sullivan-christianity-in-crisis.html