I love listening to Podcasts now as they let me listen to all kinds of great teaching (Stand To Reason, Covenant Life Church, Renewing Your Mind). But there’s another way that it can help you grow. Try intentionally listening to a little bad teaching. I’ve always wondered what an Easter service at a Universal Unitarian church is like. I’ve wondered how such an open belief system treats the most dividing event in all of time — ultimately leading to the separation of the children of God and the damned. Well, now I know.

Besides ripping words, sentences and stories completely out of context (Jesus teaches that all moral people go to heaven in the parable of the good Samaritan), embracing the gospel of Judas (see, Judas did in fact make it to Heaven), and denying the physical resurrection (Jesus was not raised from the dead but lives on in the church today), they summed up the “one true gospel” and the meaning of life in the following:

• Forgive others
• Love others
• God is love
• Your treasure is where your heart is
• Love is immortal

Sound familiar?

Living in the Bible belt, it’s hard to imagine people gathering together on Easter morning to hear about how Jesus died on the cross — not as the sacrificial payment for our sin but in pitiful shame. There was no plan. (”It is finished” translated as, “game over, man!”) Jesus wasn’t quoting the 23rd Psalm but was crying out to the Father, asking what went wrong. (”Why has Thou foresaken me?”) The most significant part of the story of the cross is when Jesus forgives those who killed him as He crosses over the bridge of love into the next life. (”Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”)

Now imagine a congregation of 1,500 people in one community soaking up teaching like this every week. The harvest is plentiful, are you equipped?