If you didn’t hear, this Saturday just gone, myself and the rest of the Hello Noise team hung out in the Launceston mall as a part of our first offline event. Wait for it: Hello Noise in the Mall. You may think it’s weird that we did, but here at Hello Noise we don’t just want to be an online blog or group, we want to be able to hang out with readers and people that like the blog in person face to face. As advanced as social networking is online, we wanna hang out offline and get to know the people that have enjoyed our work!
So we went to the mall and had a great time getting to know people and sharing what Hello Noise is about to curious onlookers, but there was one thing that happened that none of us ever expected. The Potters House turned up.
Now if you’re from Launceston you might know of The Potters House. They made the front page of ninemsn news last November when their Haunted House ‘performance’ confronted people as young as 13 with images of abortion, drug injection and rape. The Potters House through company RIOT Theatre presented the performance through questionable advertising, drawing people in to what seemed at first to be a simple haunted house performance but which turned out be so much worse. The event then ended with members of the group ‘preaching’ or some could say condemning the patrons to seek forgiveness for their sins and turn to God.
And that wasn’t the first time either. The Potters House received criticism when they launched the same stunt in 2001 without disclosing its content to patrons.
So when I say The Potters House turned up. They turned up. They surrounded the area in which our event was taking place and started going for it. They first handed out flyers, but then some of the leaders of their group took it in turns to preach to the people passing through the mall. And I wasn’t happy about this at all. Not just because they had overtaken our space, but because I know that what they were presenting isn’t what God is about.
Now I’m a Christian and I’ve never mentioned that on Hello Noise before. Not because I’m hiding behind a facade, or I’m ashamed. Far from it. I’ve honestly just never felt a need to bring up my faith. You see what I’ve written or discussed in previous blogs hasn’t required me to make statements about my belief in God. What I’ve written has come down to the needs of people and the needs of this world. Things like love, respect or leadership. This blog post on the other hand does involve God and it does involve Christianity but it’s not limited to those things. Most importantly it’s about truth and love.
You see it’s not cool to be a Christian. It’s not cool to not get drunk, or to be 19 and to have not had sex. But I don’t care about those things. What I do care about though, is how people see one person who says they’re something and they presume everyone else is the same. It annoys the daylights out of me. Through high school if people learnt that I was a Christian, they automatically got this image in their heads. Old fashioned buildings, boring kids’ activities, hymns and tons of brown suits. And then perhaps out of no fault of their own, they took that image and attached it to what they thought I believed. They then thought I was boring, that I sung hymns and that I wore a suit on Sunday. And all of things weren’t true. I don’t know what church they were thinking of, because it definitely wasn’t my church. You see those images have been associated with churches for generations and part of is to do with the fact that for some churches those things are traditions. They have taken the brown suits and the hymns and almost attached it to their beliefs, removing any possibility of relevance. But that’s not what it’s about and that’s not what my church was about! It doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible about wearing suits to church or only singing hymns. And there definitely isn’t a passage that says ‘Thou must have a stained glass window.’ Those things aren’t what Jesus cares about. He just cares about people.
So when people said those things or associated them with me, I found that hard. Because that’s not what I’m about and it’s not what God is about either.
Those people in the suits may love God, but those traditions aren’t going to get them closer to him. And if people believe they will; they’re confused. And a lot of people who say they love God are confused. Take the whole end of the world rapture scare earlier this year in which so called evangelist Harold Camping “prophesied” the return of Jesus and the end of the world. Do you know that it specifically says in the bible that no one will know the hour or the day when Jesus will return? No one as in nobody. Especially not Harold Camping. That makes him wrong.
And people look at Camping and think that all Christians are like him. We’re not! He is a dude that thinks he knows God but is really just so confused.
And that brings me back to The Potters House. The Potters House say that they follow God, but who knows where they are really at. All I know is that they are confused. You see the message they preach isn’t what God is about. God isn’t about locking people away in a condemning and evil haunted mansion and he’s not about illegally preaching in the mall telling people to turn from sin. You see all Christians are asked to share about God, as Morgan summed up in her blog post when she wrote “imagine that we really feel the need to tell others about what we believe”. If you believe something so truly you’re going to share it! But it shouldn’t be done in the way The Potters House did it. It shouldn’t be done with a bull horn or a megaphone. It should be shared with love. And that’s what the Potters House weren’t doing when they rocked up on Saturday.
A couple of friends of mine, who both happen to be local youth pastors, actually went up to some of the members of Potters House and asked them why they were doing what they were doing. They quoted from Matthew chapter 19 in the Bible which tells the story of the rich man who came and talked to Jesus.
Someone came to Jesus with this question: “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”
“Why ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. But to answer your question—if you want to receive eternal life, keep the commandments.”
“Which ones?” the man asked.
And Jesus replied: “‘You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not testify falsely. Honor your father and mother. Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“I’ve obeyed all these commandments,” the young man replied. “What else must I do?”
Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
And their point was that we should go up to people and tell them what they must do to follow Jesus and go to heaven. But my friend pointed out something to them that they’d missed. Jesus didn’t go up to the man. The man came up to him and asked. And that’s not what The Potters House were doing in the mall. They probably thought they were doing the right thing but they weren’t doing anything Jesus would have been keen on I can tell ya that.
My point isn’t that you have to love Christians or God. That’s completely up to you. My point is that yes there are some confused and messed up people in this world but not everyone’s the same. Take our politicians. They say they’re Australian but a lot of the time they are confused and say some terrible things, that doesn’t mean that all us Australians are confused too does it?
Not every ‘Christian’ is crazy like Harold Camping and not every Christian is confused like The Potters House. Jesus wasn’t about publicly condemning or trying to predict the end of the world. He was about love, traits The Potter’s House Pastor didn’t portray when I kindly asked him to take his team and leave our permitted area.
He lied to my face. “You don’t need a permit to preach in the mall” were his words. Trust me, you do need a permit to preach and he definitely didn’t have one. That’s not truth. And that’s not Christianity.
So next time you meet a Christian, just get to know them before associating them with something, because they’re probably nothing like Harold Camping or a Potters House pastor. Or you never know, they might be a confused psychopath. If so, tell them to properly read their bible.
