Tonight we watched a DVD made during ‘Surrender’, the UNOH gig in Melbourne earlier this year.

witness for the prosecution divx movie online

The DVD was of Kiwi, Mick Duncan letting rip on the whole idea of living passionately. Very inspiring – even on DVD 4 months later!

One of his statements was  ‘I lament the death of outrage in our churches’. We no longer get mad at the stuff God gets mad at. We don’t get angry and furious and wild at the state of the world we live in… and he suggests maybe we ought to.

He suggested that each of us has at least a ‘spark’ of passion in us that could become a blazing fire if we were willing to let it burn, and that spark is connected to some of the experiences that have shaped us and made us who we are today.

He shared stories of Rosa Parkes sitting on the ‘white seat’ on the bus, of Dietrich Boenhoffer muggling Jews out of Nazi Germany and of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple – all ‘anti-social’ acts. All acts that were not in keeping with the status quo, but acts that reflected the character of God.

I think there’s something in the idea that the gospel produces ‘anti-social behaviour’, but only because what is socially acceptable is a non-gospel lifestyle.

Having been around churches for a long time I felt deeply what he was saying – that our churches are full of ‘nice’ people, but we desperately need a few more wild people to reignite the passions that seem to have been quelled in so many people. The ‘gospel of nice’ has taken over and the gospel of radical discipleship and counter-cultural living has been reframed to fit a squeaky clean middle class paradigm.

The thing that disturbs me about so much of white middle class evangelicalism (that has been my heritage) is that it is so much about ‘nice’ and so little about ‘fight’ and ‘passion’. Passionate people tend to create discomfort because they stir us. They arouse in us what we wish we were like and often its easier to ignore that feeling than to pursue it.