Jesus is ___________.

If you live in the Seattle area, you can hardly have missed the bumper stickers everywhere that say, simply, “Jesus Is ______.” You fill in the blank. But what does it mean?

The bumper stickers are a product of The City Church, an evangelical mega-church in Bellevue. A quick look at their Beliefs page tells us they’re very different from Episcopalians. They believe that Holy Scripture informs us on matters of science, so clearly they’re not down with Darwin. They believe in “the literal existence of Adam and Eve” and “the worldwide cataclysmic deluge” (read: Noah’s flood). They stand very firmly against same-sex unions.

So I’m a little puzzled that a fundamentalist church would create not only the “Jesus Is ______” bumper stickers, but also create a Web site that allows you to fill in the blank yourself! When I visited the site today, a number of different submissions were flashing by on the screen, including the following:

Jesus is gay.
Jesus is the only way!!!
Jesus is bigotry.
Jesus is our beacon of strength.
Jesus is not powerful. Unfortunately his homophobic fan club is.
Jesus is glad that I’m an atheist.
Jesus is not a fairy tale.
Jesus is a popular name in Mexico.
Jesus is my savior.
Jesus is risk.
Jesus is the giver of courage.
Jesus is an unwanted baby that Mary and Joseph really didn’t want, so they blamed God.
Jesus is you.

You can add your own, too. Go ahead … try it! But ... why would a fundamentalist church create such a thing at all? Normally I think of fundamentalist churches as working hard to shut down all conversation. This site not only opens conversation … it makes no effort at all to rein it in.

So why did they do it?

And why didn’t we think of it first?