"This so hits home for me. My husband was an elder at our local congregation up until 2 months ago. Then, because the congregation didn’t agree with some of the (biblical) decisions the elders made, they were all asked to step down. So, after years of pushing and struggling to get the congregation to wake up to the lost world around us, a large group of us left and began a new fellowship. But my heart just isn’t in it anymore. My trust-meter has expired and I just want to sit and listen to God"Some reading this will just assume I am promoting they leave institutional church. That is not the case. However, having said this, this ladies story is worth hearing and reading as she articulates it well. She expresses well what I hear a significant number of people expressing in private. They will never express it in public, as that comes at a very heavy price in church. Enjoy the challenge.
It's a 5 part series...With a sneak peak at each:
First some clarification. I’m not disowning the true church, the body of Christ, the ekklesia (the gathering of other believers who desire authentic community and to pursue the purposes of Christ).
What I am leaving behind is the business of church – the institutional church. The buildings, and the committees, and the budgets, and the forced hierarchy, and the one-sided sermons, and the “services” that don’t really serve anyone.
The church has caused me to doubt the power and goodness of the Christian God. The church has caused me to doubt that a transforming power really exists in Christianity.
So we stayed much longer than we should have. Afraid of not fulfilling our calling, afraid of what people would say, afraid of what people would think, afraid of people’s disapproval, afraid of being deemed rebels or bad attitudes, or unfit for ministry.But in the end, staying didn’t do us any favors. I think people tended to give us those labels from within the institution anyway (even if not to our face).
I’ve been contacted by a small number of people concerned about the message I’m putting out there about the institutional church. I think mostly they want me to understand that there are good people in institutions, and that some institutions are much better than others. And I do understand that.
I’ve also recently seen a couple of people stress that we should focus on how we can make things right instead of focusing on what’s wrong. I understand that, also. I know that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, I do.
But I don’t know how to do that. That message seems unbalanced (and sort of lying) to me. I don’t know how to talk about how we can fix God’s church without also talking about what’s terribly terribly wrong with it.
On Friday nights people start arriving at around 5:00 and often times don’t leave until 10:00 or later. We all pitch in to bring food, we hang out, we play board games, we play video games, we play music, and we share passages from the Bible that we’ve recently read or we think need to be heard at our gathering. Often times someone comes with a stressful situation that they’ve been dealing with and we all sit around scripture and find comfort and guidance for them in The Book. Truthfully we’ve been meeting on Friday nights for probably more than 2 years now, we just didn’t have the freedom to call it “church” yet. Sundays are similar to Fridays, except longer. People start showing up around 10:00 or 11:00 and “church” lasts all day. People come and go as they are able. Some people stay until dark (or well after). Some people go home and take a nap and then come back again. Some people come after they’ve left their Institutional Church. We spend the whole day together just trying to be a family in Christ and build each other up, learn from each other.
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