I had an idea today. What if all Christians, all believers in Jesus Christ took a time from tradition, a time of reflection and reset specifically from our traditions. We could call it a year of Jubilee from tradition.
In the Hebrew history the year of Jubilee was when all debts were cancelled and everyone started from scratch anew.
I think that most of us desperately need to do that with our faith traditions.
Traditions can be powerfully destructive forces in the life of a Christian. Tradition can alienate a person from God for a lifetime, it can teach insanely ridiculous things to people who blindly continue them for generations without question. It can deceive its practitioners into believing that God approves of practices, habits and things which He had nothing to do with. Tradition prevents even the youngest, the most skeptical and fresh-minded people to overlook glaring and obvious problems.
This year 2015, could be your year of Jubilee from tradition.
Martin Luther did something similar to this and it culminated in him publically nailing his 95 Thesis to the wall of the church in Germany. It would have cost him his life if he had not had people protecting him.
Today we have as many or more traditions as they had in Luther’s day and they all need to be examined closely and regularly and when necessary; purged from our spiritual lives.
Every thing we do, every motive we have, every church practice, our motives for attending church, every activity we engage in at church, every prayer habit, every major doctrine about every topic should be re evaluated and re-measured against what scripture teaches and against what is in scripture at all. NOTHING should be in our litany of activities unless it has been evaluated like this. This is likely best done in a group of people with all agreeing to the idea of pruning out unhealthy traditions or it may be done individually between us and God.
Every Christian tradition can and should be re-evaluated by answering the following five questions:
- What is the tradition (write it out in detail, name it)
- When did it start?
- Why did it start?
- Who started it?
- Why should we continue it?
Answering number 1 can be difficult, there may be hundreds of traditions to list and to review, even acknowledging something as a tradition can be difficult. Answering numbers 2-4 requires work; research, reading, asking others. Answering 1-4 should help us to answer number 5, this answer is of the greatest importance. These are not easy questions to answer, they take research and they sometimes require a painful look in the mirror.
Traditions are powerful, traditions are able to nullify what God is trying to do in the earth. The purpose of a tradition jubilee is not necessarily to stop all traditions, but we should know why we continue, and we should continue them only with eyes wide open. Think things through, say out loud ‘I am continuing this tradition for these reasons.
Examples of traditions to list:
- We take communion together weekly as a church monthly because Jesus said to in ___.
- We eat dinner together nightly as a family for the following benefits.
- We gather together weekly because of ___:
- We give to the poor because of ___
We pray to the Father “may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” maybe one answer to that prayer is that we consider removing destructive traditions we’ve been repeating for centuries.
We should be able to agree that traditions are only wise and good if they are according to God’s will. “Its always been done this way, and we hate change” is not a valid reason to continue a tradition. Thinking like this is a form of humanism.
If you want to work on a tradition list with me, email me at collierak@me.com, I’d love to do this with someone else.
