Give Me Jesus

There is much to be said about the church. The church was born from the teachings of Jesus who taught there was another way to live amid oppression and coopted spiritual values. According to the Biblical narratives, Jesus fed the hungry, healed the sick, and taught the people about God’s love for them. His ministry was shaped in the context of Roman occupation, underpinned by a religious elite invested in its own thriving absent from the welfare of the people.

He did not always get it right yet managed to live a life that made a difference to those who experienced his ministry. And then, there are those who have come to follow his teaching, those who have come to know Jesus as the son of God, Jesus who is still present in daily living and connecting to God. How Jesus is lived, loved and understood is contextual, personal, and yet has somehow become infected by institution.

The church is not Jesus. The church is a place where Jesus should be taught, a place where people can encounter the teachings of Jesus as they choose to learn and grow in the Christian faith. The church is a place that gathers the people. A place where the teachings of Jesus are lived in community – inside and outside the walls of the church.

“My contention with the church is separated from my relationship and wrestling with God. The institution does not and will not love. It cannot. I have measured expectations of that reality based on experiences of the people who are a part of the church. God is bigger, so I continue to show up, knowing that Divine presence leads and guides.” Rev. Dr. Karen Georgia Thompson, Facebook post, 23 August 2026.

The struggle is real, the wrestling is the daily attempt to separate institution from the Divine presence, to hold true to the tenets of a faith built on the commandment to love, when the people insist on problematizing and diminishing one another. Christianity and other world religions have chosen to walk with Empire – again – choosing the status quo and power over the prophetic and the people. In the midst of the factions, the gang colors of political affiliations, differences in the commitment to justice, and the need to preserve privilege and entitlement, where is Jesus in this 21st century church?

Christianity is a major world religion centered on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. That is basic. There is the acknowledgement of the global aspects of Christianity and the multiplicity of ways the religion has evolved over the years in the use of “Global Christianities.” With over 49,000 Christian denominations globally, it is clear, all Christians do not have the same interpretation of the religion. The differences in the church being perhaps with the denominational differences and run in multiple directions: theology, ecclesiology, pneumatology, christology – and spills into the mores of societies. There is no singular response to how the teaching of Jesus inform the church. There, too, Jesus is disputed.

Unfortunately, Christians around the world may be identifying and longing for different experiences of the Divine when they say: “Give Me Jesus.” Even that is uttered with differences reflected, with some lamenting the absence of Jesus in the theological reflections that gift the life of the church. The church keeps asking for more Jesus.

Is the institution willing or ready to be confronted with the life, teachings and death of Jesus and what it means for a 21st century world where war and strife are validated with religious fervor, where Christianity continues to collude with Empire, a world in which love is conditional, and political alliances override commitments to love and care for our neighbors? Where is Jesus in the clamor for perpetuating political power and Christian privilege?

The institution is the people making decisions for self-preservation and power over the choices of others. The institution does not love and will not love because institutions are inanimate and the people who run them have ceased to love unconditionally. The desire is to have people act the same, make the same choices and live the same lives.

Give me Jesus is not a request. It is an act of surrender, one that calls for looking to God rather than to the world for the ability to complete the hard task of loving people, caring for one another and doing no harm. Give me Jesus should be the cry of the church in the face of the challenges of these times.

Give me Jesus is the refrain of an African American spiritual which emerged from oral tradition in the 19th century. Give Me Jesus is for the living of these days:

Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus.
You may have all the world,
Give me Jesus.

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