Detoxing from Church

That’s the title of a really inter­est­ing arti­cle I stum­bled upon tonight. Click here to read it in its entirety.

The author, a pas­tor who left tra­di­tional orga­nized reli­gion to form a new kind of com­mu­nity of believ­ers, makes the point that we get addicted to the for­mal struc­tures of the church. We get used to hav­ing wor­ship planned for and deliv­ered to us, serv­ing and using church to pro­vide us with a rea­son to exist. “I need dis­ci­ple­ship and Chris­t­ian growth. So I go to my local church to attend Sun­day ser­vices, Bible stud­ies and small groups where some­one opens the Bible and tells me what it says and how it should apply to my life.” In other words, we become incred­i­bly lazy, fail­ing to fully explore our faith because we rely upon some­one else to spoon-feed it to us.

Frankly, it has been my expe­ri­ence that churches are more like coun­try clubs than houses of wor­ship, com­plete with their own social struc­ture com­prised of power-bases, cliques and those who are mar­gin­al­ized and outcast.

The writer sug­gests that you “strip all of that away. Imag­ine what you would have left after you remove from your life every­thing con­nected with the orga­ni­za­tional church.”

I have plenty “left” after exit­ing. Indeed, I have more of every­thing: More time to devote to my many, var­ied inter­ests. More time to think and lis­ten for the voice of the Holy Spirit speak­ing to me. More time to pray. More time to spend with my fam­ily. More spir­i­tu­al­ity, more mean­ing­ful wor­ship con­ducted right here by myself on a daily, not weekly, basis.

Most impor­tantly, I am healthy. I am happy. I told some­one the other day that since I finally had the courage to walk away from an envi­ron­ment that I knew was drag­ging me down, I feel like a 300 pound boul­der has been removed from each of my shoul­ders. I am free.

The arti­cle just con­firms the con­clu­sion I had already reached, i.e. that “in order to truly become God’s peo­ple as he intended, we must aban­don our cul­tural ver­sion of orga­ni­za­tional church.”

I have observed this phe­nom­e­non many times and, if I am totally hon­est, guilty of it myself on a cou­ple of prior occa­sions (not this one, though):

Involve­ment in an orga­ni­za­tional consumer-driven church blinds us to the real state of our lives. By par­tic­i­pat­ing in this kind of church I can enjoy inspir­ing wor­ship, bib­li­cal expo­si­tion of Scrip­ture, fel­low­ship, small groups, kids pro­grams, ser­vice projects, mis­sions, dis­ci­ple­ship, books, radio broad­casts, mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tions and vir­tu­ally any­thing else I need in my spir­i­tual life. In fact, I can enjoy an entirely alter­na­tive lifestyle where Chris­tian­ity is prepack­aged for me – books, music, enter­tain­ment, news reports, advice, etc. And as I con­sume it, it forms a façade over the real con­di­tion of my life. The rub is when my true con­di­tion actu­ally bub­bles to the sur­face and I find myself trou­bled, dis­con­tent or mis­er­able. Then the church or the pas­tor or the wor­ship team has lost the “anoint­ing” and I must find a new orga­ni­za­tional church that will pro­vide me what I need to feel bet­ter about who I am.

In this dis­torted per­spec­tive, I fail to rec­og­nize that the true state of my life and
faith is who I am and what I do in rela­tion to God and his king­dom, not who I am
and what I do in rela­tion to the church.

He talks about mov­ing away from the church in order to be the church. The con­cept sounds sim­ple, but in prac­tice, it is, of course, dif­fi­cult. To accom­plish this, the author sug­gests that “I must look not to an orga­ni­za­tion, but to Christ alone to lead me into his divine life and love.

• I still need to wor­ship, but I am to wor­ship first as an indi­vid­ual fol­lower of Christ daily. I am a priest, offer­ing all of my life back to God in con­stant prayer, joy and thank­ful­ness (1 Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans 5:16–18)…
• I still need to fel­low­ship, but now I must actu­ally alter my sched­ule and hang out with peo­ple in real ways – over meals, over cof­fee, at my home or theirs. This also means that there isn’t a pro­gram or an event to gen­er­ate fel­low­ship. I have to ini­ti­ate. I have to be pre­pared to dis­cuss life and faith in real ways that encour­age and build each other up. I have to be pre­pared to be used by Christ to pray, lis­ten, min­is­ter, laugh, cry, con­front, encour­age, etc., all on the lead­ing of the Spirit and not at the cue of a leader or sched­uled time in a service.
• I still need dis­ci­ple­ship and growth, but now I must walk with Christ, by grace in the Spirit through a life of spir­i­tual dis­ci­pline. I must fol­low Christ into a cur­ricu­lum of spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines that trans­forms my inner world into Christ’s inner life. As such, I must study the Bible. I must pray. I must med­i­tate. I must take my own per­sonal retreats. I must read. I must edu­cate myself. I must become the­o­log­i­cally astute and spir­i­tu­ally vibrant. I must dis­cover God’s will for my life and not some canned ver­sion from a pas­tor who talks at me for [2]5 min­utes each week. I must put the same or more energy and time into my per­sonal faith than I do into my occu­pa­tion, edu­ca­tion, and entertainment.
• I still need to serve, but now I must look for the oppor­tu­ni­ties in my life. I can’t enjoy the safety of a pro­gram with other Chris­tians. I must view my entire life as ser­vice to the peo­ple I live with and live around. I must dis­cover the poor and mar­gin­al­ized in my life and be Christ to them. I can’t just give money to the orga­ni­za­tion to do it for me.
• I still need to engage in mis­sion, but now I must actu­ally be a wit­ness of Christ’s eter­nal divine life to the peo­ple I live with, work with, play with and shop with. I must actu­ally be a liv­ing, albeit flawed, exam­ple of divine life on earth. I must be able to say, ‘When you see me, you see the [Divine].’ Then I must view my fam­ily, my neigh­bor­hood, my job, and my entire life as my mis­sion field. Not in the impe­ri­al­is­tic way the church has done evan­ge­lism and mis­sions, but in the win­some, edu­cated and Spirit-led way that drew thou­sands to Jesus when he walked this earth.”

I am greatly encour­aged when I find sup­port and encour­age­ment from other folks who, like me, have felt com­pelled to leave the tra­di­tional insti­tu­tional church in search of some­thing greater and more meaningful.

Unlike the author, who talks about regroup­ing in a new com­mu­nity, I have no inter­est in get­ting involved in any group at this time. I might visit other churches from time to time, but I have no plan to attend any church on a reg­u­lar basis, much less join another con­gre­ga­tion or allow myself to become wrapped up in any organization’s lead­er­ship. I have had enough.

Rather, his con­clu­sion sums up what is impor­tant to me at this time in my life:

Only Christ is the source of divine life. Each mem­ber must fol­low Jesus daily to learn his divine life. Each mem­ber must shoul­der the respon­si­bil­ity to work out his or her sal­va­tion and not expect the com­mu­nity or its lead­ers to do it for him or her. In Christ, we can learn together, serve together, grow together, love together, etc. But we must first and fore­most fol­low Christ into his life. And to do this we must aban­don the dis­torted and addic­tive ver­sion of the con­sumer church in order to be free to become Christ’s Church.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Orga­nized Religion