Here is a great excerpt from Jonathan Dodson's, "Gospel Centered Discipleship." In this excerpt, he is referring to the motion picture, "Fight Club", written by Chuck Palahnuik.
"Fight Club does depict the struggle to recover identity in a post-modern, media saturated world. It shows us that the world is charged with bogus images of what it means to be truly human. In underground fight clubs, groups of men meet after hours in basements and back alleys to fight one another barefoot, bare chested, and bare fisted. It's a bloody ordeal.
In a speech just prior to a fight club, Tyler Durden charges the men, 'We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars-but we won't.'
In this speech, Durden pinpoints something that should confront Christians every day-the great depression of a life lived apart from a noble cause. Christians are tempted daily to believe the empty promises of the millionaire, movie god, and rock star lifestyles. We are tempted to believe that if we had a lithe more money, power, notoriety, respect, beauty, influence, or success we would be truly happy. We need to fight to believe in something better. Palahnuik's Fight Club was an attempt to fill a void left by the Church. In an interview he comments, 'I started to recognized that, in a way, support groups were becoming the new church of our time-a place where people will go and confess their very worst aspects of their lives and seek redemption and community with outer people in a way that people used to go to church...'
God is calling us to recover and redeem this confessional, redemptive, and communal role of the church. He is calling us out of our depressive, self-centered lives into the rewarding fight of faith, out of the great depression into a great spiritual war."
"Fight Club does depict the struggle to recover identity in a post-modern, media saturated world. It shows us that the world is charged with bogus images of what it means to be truly human. In underground fight clubs, groups of men meet after hours in basements and back alleys to fight one another barefoot, bare chested, and bare fisted. It's a bloody ordeal.
In a speech just prior to a fight club, Tyler Durden charges the men, 'We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars-but we won't.'
In this speech, Durden pinpoints something that should confront Christians every day-the great depression of a life lived apart from a noble cause. Christians are tempted daily to believe the empty promises of the millionaire, movie god, and rock star lifestyles. We are tempted to believe that if we had a lithe more money, power, notoriety, respect, beauty, influence, or success we would be truly happy. We need to fight to believe in something better. Palahnuik's Fight Club was an attempt to fill a void left by the Church. In an interview he comments, 'I started to recognized that, in a way, support groups were becoming the new church of our time-a place where people will go and confess their very worst aspects of their lives and seek redemption and community with outer people in a way that people used to go to church...'
God is calling us to recover and redeem this confessional, redemptive, and communal role of the church. He is calling us out of our depressive, self-centered lives into the rewarding fight of faith, out of the great depression into a great spiritual war."
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