I want to finish up these thoughts about the organized church, and hopefully, I can with this article, if I can keep my focus… which I rarely can.

In 1990, as I’ve mentioned many times, I set out in pursuit of the honest truth, no matter where it led me. When I came back to Christianity, I approached it as if I were an alien from a distant planet who knew nothing of the American Christian culture. That’s the way I approached studying the Bible and history. Through that process, I reached a confident conclusion about present-day Christianity: for better or worse, almost everything about it is cultural, even the organized church, and has been derived over time. In other words, there is no mandate about the form of the church, no intrinsic right or wrong. There is Titanic freedom in the shape of those forms.

The atom (the original Greek word Atomos means the very fundamental or indivisible part) mandate of Christianity is that there is a personal creator, Jesus was the creator’s messiah, demonstrated by rising from the dead. The directions for the crowd that followed Jesus were to love God and others as themselves, seriously. Not to just give lip service to loving others, but to really do it. The Apostle Paul gave recommendations for the crowd to meet to encourage one another. There are a few instructions for the older crowd leaders (elders) and the table waiters (deacons), but I don’t see any dogmatic language or codified rules.

I have also come to believe that it is human nature, going back to at least the Neanderthal, to religionize ideas. That is to take a simple idea and to make it into rituals and rules in the pursuit of personal piety. That process becomes highly competitive, with the individual doing more and more to prove they are more pious than others. That’s why the members of each church, Catholic, Orthodox, and a plethora of Protestant denominations, all feel that theirs is the only right church. And by questioning any of those forms, I become the devil. Again, human nature. That was demonstrated by the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Teachers of the Law in the New Testament, and I believe this is the natural tendency of Christianity and all religions, to default to. I make this point because I seek, but often fail, at de-religionizing Christianity, down to the fundamental ideas or atoms, as mentioned above.

I often say, I am a Christian, philosophically, not in a religious way. But when I write that, almost everyone thinks I’m saying that I don’t believe in a personal creator or have a personal relationship with Jesus, as if I were an atheist who just teaches Christianity as history. That is not at all what I mean. My relationship with God is profoundly rich right now, far better than the almost forty years I spent as an evangelical. I do pursue and understand God objectively, not via subjective superstition, as I had before, and that’s made a huge difference for me. I assume that your relationship is just as rich.

What I mean is that I’m not in this for piety’s sake. I do not mine the Bible, looking for rules that will make me stand out as better than someone else. And, when I share my thoughts about the organized church, I am not doing it religiously. The religious make everything a moral problem, in that competitive piety. Everyone who attacks me is a religious person, claiming they are superior to me. I’m not in to that anymore. I have no dog in that fight. So, please don’t think I’m writing about the organized church as a simple religious critic, saying those who follow it are somehow in sin. Since there is a Titanic degree of freedom in the crowd’s meeting practices, let’s pretend this is a secular discussion and move beyond moral assertions.

Imagine the church was Sears. Now imagine that Sears had a traditional way of doing something, the only time they were open was on Thursday afternoon, between 1 PM and 5 PM. You must wear orange colored clothes with funny hats to attend the sale (I’m being facetious here), and you can only ride a bicycle to the sale or walk, as they rope off their parking lot. I’m just making up arbitrary traditions, just like the Church does. Maybe, hundreds of years ago the Church’s traditions made more sense.

Now imagine that over time, fewer and fewer people were Sears customers. The customers and staff who loved the traditions thought the customers who quit were just evil or lazy, and those who came to the sale felt they were superior for coming. Would it not make sense to reevaluate those traditions before it, like the real Sears, goes out of business?

Because the core members of any church are those who love it just as it is, I’m not advocating, as some in the house church movement have, the ending of the organized church for some other model. However, my heart is with those who are leaving, because first they leave the traditions, then they leave the concept of Jesus as the Messiah, and then God altogether.

Now, in the conservative church, and I know that world well, when a child of a member, or even an established member (I’ve seen recent polls where there is an exodus of people over 60 from the church, too) leaves the church it is seen as evil, sin at least, and maybe that person will spend all eternity in a lake of fire to be tortured (which is also more of a part of tradition than what the Bible clearly says).

My sense in the progressive church, because they have fully embraced postmodernism, while they may be disappointed that their child doesn’t follow their traditions, just like I may be a little disappointed that my children don’t follow some of my secular interests, they really don’t care what their child believes about God or Jesus, just as long as they are happy and make peace in the world (because to them, all world views are the same).

My heart hurts for those who have left the church, not for leaving the church, but for leaving the concept of a personal God and Jesus as the Messiah.  But for me, it is not about them burning in a lake of fire for all eternity, which, again, is a church-traditional way of thinking, not a concept that is plain in the Bible. I also, philosophically, have a hard time imagining a God who is big enough to create this 93 million light-year wide cosmos, and with the incredible design of atoms (real atoms) built from quarks, all of which follow a mathematical order, who is perfect love, condemns people to be tortured for all eternity because they broke a rule. Makes no sense. But what does make sense to me is when you stop believing in a creator, life, by default, must become meaningless (I know atheists like to argue with me over that point).

So, I will not finish this here, but write another article with my practical ideas on how the organized church could accommodate both those who love it the way it is and those who don’t.

But before I close, I will make two statements about the benefits of a large church organization, as we have. As I alluded to last time, one is stability. From trying to create a house church, I learned that it is very hard to keep people on track in that situation. If a pastor in our denomination started to tell members to take up arms to fight MAGA or The Liberals, our denomination would quickly fire them.

The other thing, the reason I love my church so much, is that they have more resources to put their feet to the command to love others, such as reaching out to serve the community.

In Peace, Mike