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What do you need to unLearn in order to make your church a place of transformation and not just information?

As a child in Sunday school, I received information about the man named Jesus. My teacher gave me a little picture of Jesus to carry around in my wallet. It was about the size of a baseball card. You've probably seen this picture, found in many Protestant church buildings in the 1950s and 1960s—the wavy hair, the aura of light around his head. I came to think about Jesus as a player featured on the baseball cards I collected.(Unfortunately, this little picture wasn't worth as much as a baseball card!) I often wonder what would have happened if I had said to my baseball-card-collecting buddies, "I have a '58 Jesus in mint condition; what will you give me for it?" It seemed that faith was measured by the ability to quote facts and memorize trivia about a historical

player. It was just like memorizing the statistics about a baseball legend, based on information on the back of the card.

You probably remember the WWJD fad of the late 1990s and early 2000s. People wore bracelets and displayed bumper stickers all designed to help us ask ourselves, "What would Jesus do?" The idea is to try to determine what Jesus would do in a situation and then to imitate Jesus' response. But knowledge and imitation of Jesus' behavior and are not enough. First John 4:9 says, "God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him." The purpose is that we might live through him, not that we might merely believe in him. Living for God is not about imitation or information—it requires transformation. The Spirit of God must live in us.