Minimalist Guide To Christianity PART 1: What is a Christian?

What is a Christian and what is Christianity?

Christianity is the minimalist’s guide to faith based religion. According to the Bible, it’s quite simple, actually, to become a Christian. At the core of Christianity, and you may have heard this before, there is salvation.

What is salvation?
What are we saved from?
Why do we need salvation?
Who is doing the saving?
What qualifies the Savior to do the saving?
How do I receive salvation?
What happens after we are saved?

All these great questions are necessary to understanding what and who to believe in as a Christian.

As I just mentioned, Christianity is the minimalist’s guide to faith based religion. This means that it doesn’t take much to begin the journey of becoming a Christian, but it does take faith. There’s actually only two things that the Bible says we need to do to be saved and they make up the simplicity of Christian onboarding. Here’s the key scripture passage:

“If you declare [confess] with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.” Romans 10:9-10 NIV

Minimalist Christianity is:

1) Declare (or Confess) that Jesus is Lord.
2) Believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. This, Christ’s resurrection, is what Easter is about and why it is celebrated.
3) If you confess and believe those two things, you will be saved.

That is how one becomes a Christian. You see how the journey begins by faith? By faith one confesses and by faith one believes.

After that point, there’s growth we will experience on our spiritual journey, but not for the sake of salvation because Jesus did that on our behalf. What he did for us on the cross, and his resurrection, made it possible for us to receive the gift of salvation merely by the minimalist approach of confessing and believing.

Jesus is the one who saves. He is our Savior.  As Savior, Jesus is also known as the Messiah or as Christ. These titles are associated to Jesus in the same way. The title “Christ” is where we get our word Christian from, which means little Christ, Christ follower, or one who believes in the teachings of Christianity.

WHAT’S NEXT?

What happens after we confess, believe, and are saved? What exactly is a sin and what is the opposite of sin? I unpack that in Minimalist Guide To Christianity PART 2: What Is Sin?.