Scranton Revisited

I wrote a post about Scranton a few months ago. It was highly romanticized. Something has changed over the last few months in my overall attitude towards the city. Although it still contains much of it's charming quirkiness, reality has started to set in through a series of certain events, and I have been unpleasantly enlightened to the darkness of the city. A defeatist mindset pervades. A sense of distrust accompanied by its usual partner, the tribal mindset, is a cultural norm, and the divisions among ethnic lines is stunningly sharp, as if the city lives in a pre-enlightenment time warp, but doesn't know it.
I have never lived anywhere in which telling someone your religious heritage is the same thing as telling someone your ethnic background, and how baffled these people are when they hear than I'm a German-Irish protestant, whose mother was Roman Catholic, and whose father was Amish. In fact, they are even more baffled when they hear that I am not Protestant in any of the ways that they think of Protestant, and I've had to realize, living in this culture for most of the decade, that in order for people to understand where I'm at religiously I have to explain the entire Gospel of Jesus Christ, His Virgin Birth, His death for our sins, Resurrection for our life, that we only can have a relationship with God if we repent of our sins and turn to Him in faith, and this is only possible by His Grace, because in this religious/cultural atmosphere, there is no name for that set of beliefs, not even "Christian". Upon sharing this I have received 2 reactions, one extremely positive, and the other extremely negative, and ought not to be surprised by this because it is the only kind of reaction that the Gospel has ever received.
It might seem ironic that folks who call themselves "Christians" would react with strong opposition to this, but it ought to lead us to conclude that their idea of "Christianity" (the majority use of the Word), is false. Thus it is not entirely false, nor should it be problematic to say that in Scranton "Christianity" is false. Now we might go about addressing this problem in one of two ways. One, we could take pains to explain what true Christianity is, which will probably confuse people more than help them, make them think that we are trying to convert them to our version of Christianity rather than Christ, and offend them more than they need to be. Or, we could just share the Gospel, and let them reject it or accept it, and in that way we are sure that they understand the Gospel. There is little confusion, and that if they reject or accept the message, we are assured that they are rejecting or accepting the message and not some new man-made/ legalistic version of the Christian religion.
The realization that Scranton is a dark dark place, while diminishing my comfort level in the city has emboldened my belief in the exclusive power of the gospel to change lives, motivated my witness, and caused me to cry out for the city with the compassion of Jesus. In Scranton, we followers of Christ cannot afford to be religious, or get bogged down in debates over terms, and eschatology. This city, this dark place, like the rest of the world, needs the light of the Gospel, and she needs it now.