In this new segment, I want to examine what I have learned over the past 30 years on my pilgrimage to find factual truths that pertain to the church. I have to be careful to avoid misunderstandings, as the organized church is a sacred institution to most Christians.

In the 1990s, as I was learning so much about how the first Christians met and related, I decided I wanted to create a “house church.” At that time, what appeared to be the best house church movement was under one teacher, author… I will just call him “Joe,” as I can’t remember his real name right now (chemo brain), which may be for the better. I spent over a year doing due diligence, reading every book I could find on the topic, studying scripture, and the history of the early church. I also traveled to Denver for a week, where there was the “best house church system” in the country, as Joe attested, who had “planted” (started) several house churches.

I had two takeaways from that week. Number one was the beauty of the community. They had picked one Denver suburb, on the lower end of the economic scale, and the whole church bought houses there. So, some professionals who probably earned more than 200 K a year (good money in those days), living next door and at the same level as those earning 40 K. They took care of each other, sharing their wealth. As I attended some of their meetings, I was impressed by how they cared for one another and for their non-Christian neighbors. I have never seen this level of community service in the organized church until I met my present church.

But this is where it became uncomfortable. Joe had a persona, as it seems such leaders always do, of a cult leader. He defined himself as a modern-day apostle, and the group perceived him as infallible, which always leads to abuse and trouble. I know about this from my own experience in cult-like settings. He also hated, better word, loathed, the organized church, and I heard him say more than once, “I dream of riding through America on a horse and with a torch and burning down every church building I can find.” His attitude stems from competitive piety, which is endemic in all religious worlds. “I am superior to you because I believe the right things, follow the right gurus, and go to the right church.”

In summary, by the time I left, I had mixed feelings about the group.

The first statement I want to make is that I definitely don’t loathe the organized church, and I don’t think I’m more pious than others; often, I feel inferior. I have been tempted to change the name of this blog to “Barely a Christian,” as I think that’s how most Christians, including those at my own church, see me. At the bottom of the spiritual pecking order, and that’s okay. As I write with great candor, please don’t take this as simply criticism of the organized church; see my example below, which indicates there is no idealized church community experience.

At the time (mid-1990s), I was just coming back to Christianity, and, following what we were familiar with, we were attending a very large, generic evangelical church. In that church, the pastor was a very good man, soft-spoken, intelligent, and humble. We got along great. However, the real power in that church belonged to a guy, Bob, who had been the head elder since the Flintstones had attended. He was also a prototype of the modern evangelical, awash in conspiracy theories and lies. Not because such Christians were born stupid, but because they abandoned reason and evidence when the Enlightenment offended them. He did most of the speaking on Sunday mornings, sharing ideas that I thought were troublesome, almost making me want to leave Christianity again and for good. Things like the Clintons were building internment camps for Christians, the people in our government were controlled by Satan, and the gays were working together with Satan to destroy Christianity.

While some of you would say that was enough to make you want to leave, it reminded me so much of the evangelicalism I had been a part of prior to 1990 that I did not find it as repulsive as I should have. The final straw for me (and I was an elder) was when we, as elders, decided that our mission goal for that year was to reach the “unchurched.” In that community, Marquette, Michigan, there were two or three cultures. The evangelicals, the Catholics, and the unchurched who hung out in the bars.

Because reaching the unchurched was our goal, I had an idea. Setting up an extension of our church inside one of the biggest bars in town. I met with the bar owner about having a weekly meeting there, and he seemed confused but said he was okay with it if we bought beer and didn’t disturb his other customers. I discussed with our nice pastor, who was on board. Then I presented it to the elders, including Bob. My plan was to have a big table in the bar on Saturday nights where we would have beer and talk about our lives, me looking to get involved in supporting the others, just as a witness of honest love.

Bob was so pissed at me (having beer in a church meeting) that he decided there that I was working with Satan, too. That’s how competitive piety always works: if I can make you look inferior to me, then I feel better about myself. If I had a dollar for every time someone tried to explain to me that I was following Satan, rather than God, I could… well, at least buy a nice dinner.

Because the church would not go along with me on that idea, I had another passion. I knew that one of the greatest threats to Christianity (and I was right) was the rise of post-modernist thinking, and the blending of Christian ideas with those of eastern mysticism. I will state again, I respect the loving work that Buddhist and Hindus do; there are many things that they and Christians can agree upon, and I certainly respect them as individuals; however, the only way you can merge different systems with radically different basic presuppositions about reality is to give up the entire notion of truth. Another example is when my best friends were Muslims. I loved them, would take a bullet for them, yet if I tried to say that Islam and Christianity (while sharing some history) are the exact same, it would require me to be delusional.

So, I decided to teach a class at the local library titled “A Comparison of the Philosophical Claims of Western and Eastern Ideas.” When Bob found out (forgive me for calling him an idiot), he was pissed even more because a real Christian would never speak of philosophy, which is from Satan. Which, ironically, is the same response I got from my best friend here when I wrote in this blog that I love philosophy three years ago.

The Grand Church Experiment

So, with a lot of research under my belt, I set out to start a house church. An informal community of encouragement was my plan. However, after a year, it had met with disaster. It was my naivety. The American Christian culture had penetrated people’s minds far more deeply than I had realized. We had five families join us. It turns out that they were more into competitive piety, spreading lies and conspiracy theories, than even the organized church. So, while I was leaving the church to have a better handle on factual truth, they were leaving the organized church because they believed they were more spiritual and had secret truths (lies, in other words) that the mainline church didn’t accept.

To illustrate, so you understand, one family was “messianic Christians,” which meant to them that they followed Judaism and Jesus, which made them superior to Christians like us, who only followed Jesus. Yeah, they kept saying, “When you reach our level, you will understand God better.” Another family took the war with the Clinton administration more seriously and dangerously. They were an earlier incarnation of Christian nationalists, the husband packing guns and other weapons for the coming war with the government, and treated his poor wife like shit. She was required to wear a veil and could not speak to men, and her husband, following God’s direction, would spank her to rid her of the sin that women carry. So, I had a church full of nuts. The only thing worse than being a nut is being a self-righteous nut, with whom you cannot reason.

So, the one takeaway is that these people with extreme views were forced out of the organized church, which is a credit to them.

To go out on a related tangent, I must share my next step.

I dissolved the church and was considering what to do. I had two very thoughtful Calvin Seminary students in my philosophy class, and they encouraged me to attend the local Reformed church, thinking I might find more serious, rational Christians there. So, we visited it the following Sunday. The first thing the assistant pastor shared from the pulpit was that he is a Ham radio operator and he talks to a group of Christians in India. They have been telling him that Jesus has been living in India for a decade, raising thousands of people from the dead and performing miracles. However, the liberal American media have completely blocked that story, but if we could send them some money, they would use it to bring Jesus to America to do the same.

I felt an overwhelming sense of depression. Had the entire American church lost its freakin mind? Oh, the gullibility. I said nothing, but shook my head in disgust. Behind me were sitting a woman and two men, and I noticed them staring at me when I shook my head.

After church, still depressed, I took my family to a popular restaurant in town. I noticed that the woman and two men were in line behind us. I smiled at them. Denise and I and our five children made our way to a big table, and the woman and two men sat directly behind me, so close that I had to pull my chair in to make room for them.

“Thanks for visiting our church,” the woman said.

I smiled again, with a mouth full of food. Then, before I could swallow, she said out loud so that most of the people in the restaurant could hear, “You don’t have Jesus, do you?”

I whispered, “Please, let me eat.”

Then she stood up and shouted, “He’s full of Satan.” The men gathered around me, and she announced, as they put their hands on me, “In the name of Jesus, demon, leave this man…” I got up and ran out to my car, lay in the seat, and cried. At that moment, I thought, Should I leave Christianity for good? Is it all just bullshit, ignorance, and pretense?

When Denise and the kids joined me in about an hour, she said, “What is it about you? It’s like you have a bullseye on your back that draws religious people to attack you.”

In Peace, Mike