In my opinion, no. But different members of the Body of Christ have different gifts, and different perspectives. The Lord very clearly told me to stop smoking, and I felt incredibly condemned in my conscience when I went back to it. (To my surprise, since I knew the Lord was telling me not to do it, it was an easy habit to break after I got hooked again.) But I’ve also known some wonderful Christians who smoke, including one who has always been a supply of grace to me.

Can that be a descriptor for Christian behavior?

Depends on what the “descriptor” is. But if I were in the same situation, and the kids could relate to me, I would have hung out with them, but without smoking. I might have even told them why I no longer smoked, but not in a condemning or self-righteous way, just matter-of-fact.

Can Christians be the people who Always buy cigarettes for the punks?

I just don’t think so. But if the Lord gives you life and peace in the process, who am I to argue? I have a hard time believing the Lord would honor our encouraging or enabling destructive behavior, and I would put smoking in that category (addiction, damage to the physical body, etc.). Paul the apostle said “All things are lawful, but I will not be brought under the power of anything.” I think smoking brings people under its power, and should be discouraged.

My two cents.

Lets start with a story.

Once upon a time, I was a young, ugly, disenfranchised, loser punk loner outcast that no adult trusted and few of my peers wanted to be around. I can remember a handful of times where adults saw through that and treated me otherwise, and a handful of older kids who included me and enjoyed being around me.

The reason I bring this up is because, as I was buying menthols for some ugly, young punk loser girls who approached me with a tremulant “excuse me, Mister..”, how not a lot changes but that, after you survive adolescence, you can see yourself in lots of different people.

For me, I still drive a piece of crap car and more or less still look the part of a (fashionable) grown-up loser outcast – certainly enough that a couple of kids who’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get somebody to buy them cigarettes for half the afternoon might view me as potentially sympathetic to their cause – but I realized an inherent ethical dilemma that wouldn’t let me relax as I paid the young Food Lion cashier for their cigarettes and my chocolate syrup.

As a ‘Christian’, I felt obligated not to help them – don’t encourage delinquency, right? As a former delinquent, I felt obligated to steal for them; with a disgust bordering on love I felt the desire to hang out with these kids, a temptation that I resisted because of some mix of morality and Christian sensibility. I handed them their cigarettes and drove off laughing to myself, and went home to wonder who I am nowadays – thinking about how punk gave me philosophy and how philosophy and me sailed away from punk and how I looked back to watch my youth fade into the horizon with not much to show for it but a lot of books read and a lot of thoughts thought.

I’ve bought cigarettes for kids before, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt like an adult while doing it – ever felt alienated from them by a Something inside. A deep nervousness about being loving, I guess. I never thought that feeling would find me.

So I ask you this: should Christian adults buy cigarettes for loser kids, like it ain’t nothing? Can that be a descriptor for Christian behavior?

Can Christians be the people who Always buy cigarettes for the punks?

This is an absolutely dead-on statement. I believe we need to worship God, learn about Christ, and practice Christianity in a community, realizing that community will never be perfect (or filled with perfect people), but that we can’t really understand God in isolation, either.

The tension lies in being part of a small NT kind of church where members care for one another and challenge each other’s thinking and behavior, compared to small churches that band together because everyone is supposed to think and act alike.

There were a couple of years there where I had no idea where I was going to land, religiously speaking, but now, if I’m forced to label myself, I say that I am “Christian-ish.” I still like to wrestle with the Bible, I dig the Jesus I read about there, but I can neither confirm nor deny the historic creeds. I’m okay with that.

And honestly, for me, being outside of evangelicalism is not a plight or a wilderness – it’s a relief. While it’s true that I can win the majority of “What’s the worst thing that Christians have ever done to you?” contests, and I was carrying around a LOT of pain, the truth is that I could never buy the theological party line. I spent the first three decades of my life feeling like I was the only one in the room who didn’t know the secret handshake, and it’s been liberating to realize that I was just in the wrong damn room.

Anyway, thank you for wanting to really hear to those who have left evangelicalism. That’s not a common quality in the evangelical world as a whole.

Peace.

Michael, as I’ve written previously, I do empathize with Ed’s plight. I have been in less Gospel-centered churches, and it was very trying at times. (I eventually left to find a more Gospel-centered church– I realize not everyone has that option.)

However, what do we do with the Bible’s picture of local churches (at Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus) and with the non-existent concept, Biblically, of a believer *not* belonging to a local church? Where does God’s word ever tell us that if the church has hurt us, we may need to walk away from the Biblical portrait of church, with appointed elders, deacons, and a body that is living out the Christian life together, *as* a body?

(I realize things in cyberspace don’t really weigh anything, but you know what I mean.)

I think the hard part for me is the loneliness of life after leaving a Christian community and not being able to find one since. I was in a very intense church, and got severely wounded and burnt out. I’ve met with other groups, and received some grace there, but can’t quite join myself to them due to the “entertainment culture,” the strong sense of committment (including an obligation to tithe), etc. I currently meet with a megachurch which has a lot of positive aspects, but I don’t think I can ever become a member. And even though I know I need “community,” one of the things I like there is preserving my anonymity. I’m just not ready for people to be acting like they own me, which I think is inevitable once you commit.

There are others who left the group I was once in. They are kind of wanderers, half-heartedly looking for the good things they once had in community (constant fellowship and prayer, a strong sense of purpose, a culture standing against the outside world, etc.), but scared to death of the bad things (the domination by leaders, the imposition of the latest “new move,” the presumptions and meddlings about personal affairs, the violation of boundaries, etc.). We communicate by email from afar, but don’t have a heart to join ourselves to anything new, or to replicate what we were once in because we know where it ends – woundings and disillusionment. So we wander in the wilderness, like sheep without a shepherd.

What’s helpful about your blog, Mike, is to hear that “you are not alone.” That is so important, and so comforting. May the Lord bless all of His wandering and wounded seekers with Himself, and may He eventually grant them some form of community that provides them the “oil and wine” for healing and restoration.

My vision of the house church was not realized because the five families that joined us seemed to have exited the established church from the opposing side. While we exited from the post-Evangelical door, the other five families had exited from the hyper-Evangelical door. They were not happy with the Evangelical church because it didn’t have enough extraneous rules for behavior, or because it did not hate certain groups, like Democrats, enough. Seriously, one family wanted us to take up arms to fight Janet Reno (an Armageddon thing). So in frustration I abandoned it after a year. It took that long to figure out we were not on the same page.

Then I went through a phase of trying to be an agent of change within the traditional church. This meant being a deacon, elder in a couple of churches, small group leader etc. But it always came down to the problem of wineskins. One voice can not change the tide of tradition and Christian socialization. Tradition has always trumped reality or truth.

So now I exist in a state of suspended animation. I am a member and attend a traditional church and plan on staying. Yet, I’ve tasted true community and it is not here. If I had a serious problem in my life, like marriage trouble, our church would be the last place I (or anyone) would go due to the “pretend we are perfect” syndrome. But the Biblical hermeneutics and teaching are pretty good. So I approach it like an ecumenical smorgasbord. I just hope I can find the missing pieces of Christian community elsewhere.

But this unfulfilled longing is not a bad thing. Like in Hebrews 11, there is this anticipation of perfection that keeps us hoping for things unseen. Christ’s complete restoration of this world will come someday, then all will be well.