If I may be so bold to speak on behalf of others more than just myself, we’re a ragtag bunch, many us Christians.

And that’s exactly how I like it.

You look at our diversity and it’s astounding; as our cultures brush up against each other, we are all shaped, challenged, and blessed by the differences we bring to our communities. And while I’m sure those around us sometimes scratch their heads, wondering what it is that ties us together, we know that sometimes the only thing linking us to each other is Jesus, himself. And we rejoice in that.

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The world of facebook (similar to MySpace, though a better platform in my opinion) is a strange and fascinating world. A medium that connects people from around the world, a platform that offers “community” on some level.

Confession: I enjoy reading the “religious views” description of everyone whose page I come across. I am especially fascinated by the variety of descriptions Christians give, and it makes me realize with even more acute awareness that our generation is fighting against conformity.

Very few of us are choosing to describe ourselves as “Christian.” A quick five minute search on facebook brought up the following descriptions (one will find that almost nowhere is the word “Christian” used without some sort of caveat):

* lover of God; extreme Jesus follower

* non-religious like Jesus

* Loving follower of Jesus Christ

* I am a Christ Follower

* religion = do // Jesus = done

* purchased by the blood of Christ

* Born again Christian embracing Hebraic roots

* Follower of God in the way of Jesus

* “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” Romans 3:23

* Follower of Christ

* Pure & Undefiled before the Mighty1 & Father: Visit Orphans and widows under affliction: Keep one Self Unstained From the World

* Jesus lover

* forgiven.loved.

* Jesus Freak

* Christian – A relationship not a religion

* i love jesus!

* Jesus is my Lord and Savior! =)

* radical follower of the Way…Acts 9:2

* Jesus is Lord, God, and Savior – led a perfect life, died on the cross, and rose again

* I love the Lord.

And that is only the beginning of descriptions. It’s clear that there are few of us in my generation (I’m twenty-five) who are followers of Jesus who actually chose to use the label “Christian.” So what happened to simply saying “I’m Christian”? Why do we go to such great, creative lengths, and at the risk of sounding cultish, to avoid saying “I’m Christian”? If I could guess, it’s probably because it’s been hijacked by so many who claim the name of Christ but who do not know Him. Erwin McManus penned one of my all-time favorite quotes: “Christianity has become our Shawshank, and our redemption will only come if we find the courage to escape the prison we have created for ourselves.”

I think the truth we’re trying desperately to express is that we’re not concerned with Christianity the religion – we’re concerned with following Jesus. Christianity the religion is the prison we’re seeking to break from. And so we come up with every possible way under the sun to convey that to those around us.

Should we try to redeem the word “Christian” from those who have hijacked it for their own purposes? Yes. But in the meantime, we want to make it clear where we stand. We love Christ; we’re about the things he was about; we’re seeking to love a broken and dying world with his love. We have been redeemed by Jesus’ blood on the cross and restored to a right relationship with God, and because Jesus rose from the dead and lives today, we have LIFE. We live in freedom, not subject to our sin and no longer living in bondage.

This whole mindset comes down to a personal level: I learned quickly in college to not allow others to ascribe the label “Christian” to me. Why? Because I distance myself from the vast group of Christians in the United States who are nominal Christians or who are simply culturally Christian.

I am fiercely in love with following Jesus, and I don’t want my relationship with God to be confused with the “Christianity” of the Crusaders or with many of the Christians today who deny Jesus by their lifestyles. As Brennan Manning wrote, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him with their life style. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” I think Manning is on to something that we’ve started to clue in to. And so you have a generation of believers in Jesus who are hesitant to fall into the “Christian” camp, because let’s face it, people professing to be Christians have done a lot of stupid and horrific things throughout history and thus “Christians” have gotten a bad rap.

It is thus the misconstrued understanding of what it means to be “Christian” that motivated me to distance myself from the word; when talking to Muslim, Jewish, and atheist friends, I realized many did not understand what it meant to follow Jesus; they would hear the word “Christian” and already have a preconceived notion of what that meant from the media, from their teachers, from history, and from their neighbors (and rightly so) and that grieved me. So I began to spit out, when asked what my religious affiliation was, “I’m a born-again non-denominational follower of Jesus” (I oftentimes had to take a breath after delivering that mouthful) in the hopes of avoiding a label. I wanted as much as possible to distance myself from the idea of “religion”, because my faith is not based upon a religion but is based upon following a Galilean carpenter named Jesus. (And yes, you’ll be hard pressed to find me comfortable with most of the Christian churches I step into today. I look around and wonder what would be Jesus’ response to what humanity has done to his name and in his name.)

A friend once said Christianity is fine in and of itself, but the minute you put Christians together, inevitably they start to mess things up. The truth hurts, but we must take responsibility. And isn’t that the whole point of what those of us who profess Jesus as Lord and Savior believe? That we’re screwed up people in need of redemption? In need of fixing? In need of reconciliation with God? And that Jesus is the only answer?

And perhaps therein lies the beauty I see in being a rebel – by focusing on Jesus, we circumvent all the crap that Christians throughout the ages have added to Christianity; we point to the reason for our faith – it all rests on Jesus. As the Apostle Paul said in 1st Corinthians 15, if Christ has not risen from the dead then we are of all humans most to be pitied.

So, while we might very well sound like a cult with all of our variations, attempting through amazing acrobatic feats to avoid the label “Christian,” in reality we’re asking that we not be put into neatly constructed boxes of what it means to be a “Christian.” We’re marching to the beat of a different drum, and we’re hoping that when others talk to us and enter into friendships with us, maybe we’ll start to redeem what it means to be “Christian.”

In the meantime, I’m a follower of Jesus, pure and simple.

- Christen Patterson, July 2007