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Donald Miller: ‘There’s No Social Commodity for Being Christian’

Back in April, Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller posed one question to an audience of young adults gathered for Sojourner magazine’s Mobilization to End Poverty event in Washington, D.C.: If you took the elements of a good story and integrated them into your real life, what would that look like?

For months that question has plagued me, quietly challenging me to live a more compelling story in my own life. This past week, Miller released his highly-anticipated new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, which is full of the lessons he’s learned about how to turn an unstructured and random life into a meaningful existence.

This summer, I had the chance to speak with Miller about the new book and asked him what trends he’s noticed in the Church.

COCOA CHANEL: What’s fashionable in faith? What are some of the trends you’ve noticed in the Christian church at large?
DONALD MILLER: I don’t think about church very much. I think because I talk to Christians, people ask me about church a lot. But I’ve never been a pastor. I’ve never been on staff at a church. That’s for much smarter people than me. So I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about that.

Part of it is because I’m way up here in Portland, and we’re largely an unchurched community. And I notice when I leave Portland and I go to church somewhere how foreign it feels—its literally like you’re going into a different country. It always strikes me as weird. There’s no social commodity for being a Christian here. There’s no benefit. Where you can go to the south or the southeast and one of the things your employer may want to know is, “Do you attend church?” So here, if your employer found out you attended church, it would almost assuredly cost you something. And not that they would be against you, they would just think that you’re weird. And so for us, we’re a small community of people who cling to each other and cling to Christ and live it out in a very real way. There’s no gain.

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To read more of my interview with Donald Miller, head over to UrbanFaith.com. Be sure to leave a comment by October 19th to enter to win a FREE copy of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

October 3, 2009 - Posted by cocoa chanel | books, church, faith, religion | Donald Miller