Grace

Last night, some friends from college and I watched some films which took the mick out of Christians - Saved! and The Church. They were pretty funny actually. Saved! is made by non-Christians and set in a "Christian" high school in the USA, and The Church is a spoof done by a church in London in the style of The Office. To be honest, I thought both were quite funny.

What was striking though was that in both situations, the Christians were almost entirely graceless. The characters in them seemed not to understand that Christians are not better than other people - that we're all bad, we're all deserving of hell, but that Christians have been forgiven, and therefore have no right to claim any moral high ground. Given the number of times that judgementalism is condemned in the Bible, and the amount of emphasis on the total undeservedness of God's love for us, I think that's significant.

Interestingly, it's also the major thing missing from the (very twisted) church in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

So, is the church not communicating grace? Are we denying it by the way we act towards others? (I think we are sometimes - my attitude towards smokers, for example, or the way the church has been seen to respond to homosexuality)