Several years ago, I had the privilege of teaching a Sunday school class for teenagers. It had been my dream because I have a heart for this group, and studies show that 64% to 75% of those raised in the church leave it by age 30, and most never come back.

On the first day of class, I did an exercise in which I listed about twenty “Christian” items and asked the class to place each in one of two categories: Biblical Mandates and Christian Culture. In the list, I had things as diverse as “love your neighbors,” “Church that starts at 10 AM on Sunday,” “not murdering,” “sitting in pews,” “singing hymns,” etc.  To my shock, they listed every single item as “Biblical mandate.”

I did this because studies show almost 100% of the reasons teens leave are cultural, not simple Biblical mandates. I wanted to separate the two because I don’t want to see these children leave.

After teaching this class, the pastor angrily fired me. I tried to explain why I had done that, but he was not interested in the explanation, only in the fact that parents had complained. Now, many years later, I don’t know the whereabouts of each of those kids, but of those I do know, they did, sadly, follow the statistics on leaving… and I don’t blame them.

If a parent wants a child to remain Christian, the worst thing they can do is to make it a requirement that they follow all the Christian traditions that they do, most, if not all, having nothing to do with the Bible.

I must point out that to take the word “church” out of our modern connotations, it is a translation of the original Greek word ekklesia, which literally means “the called out ones.” It only refers to people, like the English word “crowd,” although crowd does not imply being called out.

I spent years studying the concept of church in the 1990s. When I approached my studies honestly, not through the lens of my own culture, I concluded that the only hint of a mandate for the church is not to avoid getting together but to encourage one another… Full stop. Everything else is just fluff. Additionally, as far as personal practice is concerned, Jesus was clear that the entire law is summed up in loving God and your neighbor… Full stop.

Now the Christian traditionalist will extort those words to mean, “That if you really love God, you will go to church worship service every Sunday, love singing hymns, love listening to preaching, not say swear words, not smoke, not wear certain clothes… and on.

As I have mentioned, saying the things that I do, I have frequently been attacked by religious people. The closest I have ever had to actually being punched was in a church in Minnesota. I was leading a Sunday school class on a book of the Bible. In my private studies at the time, it had become clear that the purpose of the Christian crowd (the church) was to meet to encourage one another. I had thought of my Sunday school class. Our church was a commuter church, meaning it was near the city of Rochester and drew people from many miles away. While I had made an effort to learn everyone’s name, I’m sure that many of them did not know the names of the others in the class, and certainly nothing about most of them. I asked myself, “How can you encourage someone if you know nothing about them?”

The next Sunday, I said, “Okay, folks, we are going to do something different. For the first fifteen minutes, we are going to get in circles of five or six, and each of us is going to answer three questions. Each week will be a new set of questions. The questions today are: 1) What is your name? 2) Where do you live? 3) What kind of work do you do?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a commotion and Denise jumping up to talk to a man standing in the corner. She eventually got him out of the door. Meanwhile, I was focusing on the group and did not know what was happening. It turned out the man was in a pure rage and was coming to attack me, physically, I think, because “I had defiled the house of God with my humanistic garbage.”

I hope you see the point I am trying to make; I tried to follow the very simple mandate for the church. This person, like most, was so deep into the American Christian culture that he saw me as the defiler.

It would take a whole book to explore why our culture controls us so much. It resides in the deepest part of our brain, and makes it very hard to see reality. There is an old short film from 1969, but remade into a movie in 1996, that tries to illustrate this idea. In this story, it is a tradition in a small town that they hold a lottery, putting everyone’s name in a hat and drawing one name. The name drawn would be stoned to death by the rest. No one can figure out why they have that tradition, and the person being stoned begs for mercy, but there is none because they must uphold it.

Paul wrote in Colossians 2:8, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”

Yet, for 2000 years, the church has ignored that warning and has moved from one tradition to the next, codifying its tradition as God’s mandate, and if you speak against the tradition, you would have been tortured and killed, but today, only shunned.

Conclusion: The Only Mandate for the Church is to Encourage One Another… Period.

Let me be clear: the problem isn’t having traditions or different philosophies, but being taken captive by them and controlled by them. The progressive Christian church, in my opinion, is controlled by the Kierkegaardian post-modernist philosophy, and the conservative church by American nationalistic and other philosophies. Neither is simple Christian.

I will pause here, but to say, I am not an enemy of American church traditions. Personally, I don’t like Sunday morning “worship” for several reasons. The church I attend has one of the best ones I’ve ever been to, yet I would trade it in a millisecond for quality time with other Christians, where we encourage one another. I thought I would find that in a small group, but I found that experience profoundly discouraging for me, as it did not allow for dissent from the philosophy of postmodernism. The secular people, who naturally love each other, hang out in a bar and encourage one another, not requiring their friends to follow philosophy x or y, sounds utopian to me. I know of a “church” in Oxford, England, that has modeled itself around such encouragement and honesty, upholding factual truth, and is centered in a pub. I would have perfect attendance at such a church, but that’s just me.

Next time, I will write about how we see tradition as “God’s Providence,” believing that the way we have always done church is God’s church, when, in reality, it is the way we humans have created church.

Peace, Mike