By "Losing My Religion," "I Will Survive"

My church is in the middle of a great new series right now called "My Generation." We're taking a look decade-by-decade at the music and culture of the 70's - 00's and, more specifically, how that serves as a sort of lens through which people who 'came of age' in those decades view religion.

Unfortunately, due to an extremely annoying summertime sinus problem, I was out of commission last weekend when the topic was the decade with which I most closely relate - the nineties. Luckily we ("we" because the bug eventually got to everybody in our household!) were back on our feet and back at Quest this weekend, though, for the seventies.

Thanks to iTunes, I was able to back up and listen to the 90's service late last week, and it was still fresh on my mind during the 70's yesterday. It was as though I was fitting two talks into the space of one, but it really worked for me personally in a couple of ways. On a simpler level, I'm looking at the decade in which I was born as well as the decade when I went to high school and most of college - a nice way to 'bookend' some major life milestones, in effect. On a deeper level, though, the illustrative songs from the last couple of weeks spoke to me in ways I really didn't expect. From the 90's, the band rocked out to an incredible dead-on cover of R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," a song I like and (in a brilliant allocation of brain cells) know all the words to, but that I'd never really pondered in any deep way. Then from the 70's, we were treated to an amazing performance of "I Will Survive" (yep, know the words to that one, too). Put them together, and you get "[by] Losing My Religion, I Will Survive."

Huh?

Well, let me explain. I'm involved right now, as the title of my blog indicates, in a fairly intense seeking process. A major part of that has included trying to discern what it is, exactly, that's acting as a barrier between me and Christianity. And as far as I've been able to figure out, one of my biggest obstacles has been the overarching concept of "religion" and, even more specifically, the various bizarre ways humans have interpreted "religion" throughout the centuries.

Over the past year or so, I've slowly come to realize that much of what I've always used as an excuse to avoid church (various social and political agendas that we really don't need to go into here) have nothing to do with the foundations of Christianity. In fact, as I look back it seems almost painfully obvious how much of my "baggage" was/is the result of these preconceived erroneous notions of what "church" is. Quest has been an amazing place to work through these things.

The closing week of the series on Ephesians touched briefly on the concept of our short life here and what happens once that is over. With eternal survival hanging in the balance, perhaps the most direct route to survive is, in fact, by losing religion and focusing instead on what religion was supposed to be about all along.