Saturday, September 26, 2015

the religion of WWRA

One of the emerging "religions" or faiths or worldviews in our culture is WWRA: Who We Really Are. Rick Hiemstra, EFC's [Evangelical Fellowship of Canada] Director of Research, says in the recent edition of Canada Watch:
there is a new and fairly aggressive civil religion. I call it ‘WYRA’ which is short for “Who You Really Are.” The central problem for our culture is not that you’re separated from God, but that you lack the knowledge of your true identity. Our culture preaches that when we discover who we really are, we will discover a super hero or someone who is perfect. Christians say who you really are is a sinner and that you need to be changed from who you really are into the image of Christ. This is the heart of the conflict that we’re experiencing with our culture.
And so questions about justice and what's right and wrong are answered with: "right or wrong is based mostly on what I feel." This emerging civil religion is built around personal subjectivity.
As followers of Jesus, we need to discover ways of speaking a fresh story into our culture: God created good things, which we broke through our self-centred search for identity within ourselves. Restoration calls for re-orienting our lives around Jesus and a focus on God's kingdom concerns, rather than our own. 
It is this focus - that we find truth and meaning in the person of Jesus, that is the foundation of social justice not personal, and often privatized, subjectivity.

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