“The solid reality is Christ´s!”  (Col. 2:17, NEB)

Last Sunday I went to our local Catholic church primarily because of my Tamil friends.  I also wondered if I could communicate with somebody else.  I was however too taken up with my friends for that to happen.

Like the Protestant church it´s saturated with rituals, motions, reiterations, conformism and of course their special Catholic features to which I´m just an outsider.  And yet with my Tamil friends I sense genuine spiritual hunger whenever we meet outside the church walls. 

In the Western world mechanical church going is often like that despite the denominational  tradition.  Among persecuted Christians the situation is  different.

A Baptist, genuinely saved in Christ, was one day “down” and unhappy.  He was a prisoner in a Russian concentration camp.  He was spiritually bankrupt.  To his surprise a fellow prisoner from the Orthodox church came to his rescue and in true love pointed to Christ and His finished work as the only answer to his gloomy sadness.  He was surprised.  “Can anything good come” from the Orthodox quarters?

It did, but the answer was not Orthodox religion, but Christ!  In those tough circumstances ritualism and religious “hobbyhorses” had to go or be “stabled”.  A quest for spiritual reality was more relevant, and was found in Christ alone, who is there without any religious “linen cloths”  tied on him. (This instance is from Hermann Hartfeld´s book “Glaube trotz KGB”, i.e. “Faith despite KGB”).

Spiritual reality is not about our particular church set-up.  It´s not Christianity, but discipleship, which is a walk with our glorified Lord to be exhibited by our presence and by our word of testimony, not as talkative parrots, but as true witnesses with a self-experienced Christ held forth to needy souls.

Oct. 19, 2012 – jn