Difficult questions...

Last Friday night I was eating dinner and getting ready to run out the door to our end of term youth group event. Which is precisely the time kids love to hit you with "those" questions. My oldest was sitting at the table and completely out of the blue asked me...

"Dad, what's the difference between Catholic and Christian?"

Ummm... right, what to say? How do you explain 500 years of Western History in a minute or two? And course the answer is, you can't. We also live in a community with lots of people with Catholic heritage. Many of them hold it near and dear to their hearts and I didn't want something negative and judgmental being spread round the schoolyard later on. So here was I trying to distill everything down as effectively as possible. In the end the answer I came up with was this...

"Christians read the bible"

She replied,

"And Catholics don't?"

And the best I could do was,

"Something like that."

Now of course, this is a complex discussion. There are many differences between the Catholic Church and other mainline denominations like the church I run. Still, from what I've been told by the many Catholics I've spoken to, one of the biggest differences is the way we treat the bible. It seems people in the Catholic Church are not encouraged to read the bible the way Churches elsewhere do.

The upshot of this is that many people I've met who identify themselves as 'Catholic' haven't read the bible much, if at all. One man told a friend of mine one day...

"We're not Christians, we're Catholic."

In saying all this, it's not my aim to potshots at people who identify as Catholic. I've got something else in mind.

This weekend is Easter. The guts of what Christianity is about. Jesus' death and resurrection. But do you know why? Have you read about it? What did Jesus actually say? What did he actually teach? Why did he die? Why do Christians claim he rose from the dead?

Find out for yourself.

Take some time to read the Bible. Find out from eyewitness accounts. The stories of Jesus' life were recorded so we could read it and work it out for ourselves.

Follow this link and read Mark's biography of Jesus life or here... Mark's gospel on Youtube

It's short, punchy and tells the story of the first Easter. You may well be surprised what you find.

Oh, and enjoy the eggs.