Many people are increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream Christianity, and worldwide there is a hunger for a new reality. Questions are being asked about what we believe, and why; about how we express and live our faith. This article looks at how reduced and distorted ‘truth’ has opened the door to a legalism that is killing faith, and suggests that we need to rediscover the heart of what it means to be a Christian - a relationship with Jesus.

In this article (much too short to do justice to this subject) I would like to ask the question: ‘What is truth?’ Of course this is not the first time this question has surfaced. It was asked in an exasperated fashion, maybe with a sneer, by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate who ironically had, at that very moment, a man standing in front of him who claimed to be the truth. This simple picture illustrates what I want to suggest here: that truth can only be understood if it is based in relationship, and worked out through relationship.

Many people I meet these days are asking questions about how we should behave as Christians, how church should be expressed, and so on. The old ways of doing things do not seem to fit any more. So, as the director of a ministry aiming to help creative people, I write this to try and help my friends who are artists, musicians, and actors, make sense of this world in which we live; a world - at least when it comes to Christianity - of constriction, where the understanding of what it means to be a believer is reduced to a very narrow set of paradigms, or a very narrow interpretation of acceptable behaviour. Not a very nice place to live, particularly if God has given you a creative spirit.

The question ‘What is truth?’ is, of course, strangely alien to a post-modern world that claims to deny the existence of objective truth, and as you read this you may feel that I, too, am rejecting absolutes. But what I am rejecting are the caricatures of truth that have become common currency in our Christian speech and behaviour: reductions that have either trapped us in cage of conformity - the Christian equivalent of political correctness - or made us feel guilty for no longer feeling part of a Christian world that seems increasingly alien. Maybe you also find yourself, like Bruce Cockburn, pacing the cage? My prayer is that by understanding, at least in part, the answer to the question of truth, we will then be able to answer the question made famous by Francis Schaeffer: ‘How then shall we live?’