It’s a funny thing how we Christians can be gloriously right about the one thing,
and still quite wrong about another. One can put his finger on a truth you should have seen
a thousand times over by now, and still not be seeing a right thing you’ve pointed out to others
a thousand times over the years.
Surely, there are some among us who do not love the truth at all, but are there not many who,
when they are right, are right quite on purpose, and for love of truth?
How sad, then, that still we are so wrong about so much.
I cannot help but to think that we have not yet restored the religion fully to its original high valuation of study and reflection, and of orderliness of doctrine. Those paradigms are in the scriptures, but do they do not run wholly through the churches. Too many have dismissed the philosophy of Christ, in deference to some mere practice or other that is supposed to trump the need for the Christian to be a philosopher—to exempt him from having to learn how to use the mind God gave him in order to learn and to grasp the principles and precepts of God’s word.
The pendulum still swings toward the reign of the institutions, who will not let the minds be free to do their rightful work. It is, for them, a religion of mere belonging more than of
wrestling with the truth in one’s own mind. It’s more a program than a philosophy. It is a religion of accepting on the whole what one is told, rather than of understanding it piece by piece for oneself. And their idea of “faith” is in trusting the wall to be right, rather than in learning how to demonstrate whether the particular bricks in the wall are each right. And this is how all the errors got hidden into the big package, for the religion as it is taught to millions does not make good sense on the brick-by-brick level. And the result is a church culture that’s not very good at spotting the various doctrinal conflict that arise from this sort of practice.
And in such a dull culture, one can be marked as a “radical” at the very first instance of challenging the fences—of questioning the “orthodoxy” of his times—of pointing out a single problem with a single brick in the wall of doctrine. Yet the “radical”, who may well be right in his challenge, may still be a thousand similar challenges shy of getting the whole of it right.
Indeed, it is very easy to underestimate just how dull we are in this age of institutions—this age of religion by proxy, where belonging to the right institution is considered more important than having the right understandings in ones own mind. And we are much too prone to thinking ourselves the geniuses for figuring out the one problem, when there are still a thousand left to be solved. And if you’re not sure I’m right about this, just watch how we behave:
When we split over a religious difference, what is our first inclination over what to do next? Is our first inclination to keep on studying, in search of other errors that also need to be fixed? Or is it, rather, to find or start up a new church institution, under the same assumption that the old one had—that we’ve more or less got the whole thing figured out now, and are ready for a long-term period of normalcy? I think the latter is much more common, and it’s a nasty habit I call the Gap Trap—where we get ourselves caught in a trap between where we used to be and where we could be by now, if we weren’t so fixated on circling the wagons and starting up a new institution at the first opportunity.
I can give you a really good real-world example of this. A new Facebook friend recently approached me to be one of five leaders in a new online church that he wanted to start to help people who were having a hard time finding good local fellowships. But was he looking to solve the problems that divide people? No, he was looking to start a new institution. He was working under the assumption that a new institution was the need of the hour, and not the solving of the many problems that plague the existing institutions. I mentioned my Gap Trap article to him, and he read it, and thought it was very good, but even so, he was still minded to do some of the very things the article warns against. And my point in all this is that we can recognize a bad thing when we see it, and still keep on doing the bad thing.
Why are we like this? How did we ever get to be this way?
I think it’s because we are not very well practiced at obeying this biblical one-liner:
Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways….”
Haggai 1:5
And this:
Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.
Proverbs 4:26
And there are so many more iterations of this command in the Bible—more than we can recite, because we have missed them. And ironically, we have missed them for not thinking them important. In other words, we haven’t given careful thought to our ways because we don’t think it’s important to give careful thought to our ways—even though the Bible repeats such commands often. We have ignored that part of the religion, in deference to whatever else we have found more valuable and important. And we learned to think this way at church, did we not?
And the result of that—as well as it’s cause—is the church culture we have today, where many of the details are recklessly hand-waved into oblivion in order to keep the institutions running smoothly. It is a self-perpetuating cycle. We may not realize the message this sends to God, but when we prioritize the institution over our own righteousness, we’re telling God that we think that church is more important than godly living and thinking is. And I think that God gets the message loud and clear. Ironically, the ones who don’t get it are us! We can go on and on telling ourselves that we’re doing right by having church, while lacking in the proper care about how it should be done and what should be taught and how we should live.
And that is the culture in which this generation has grown up. The institution is in charge, right or wrong. And if we don’t like it, we just find a new institution—or start our own. And there’s little room for the individual to develop a robust and godly mind of his own because it is the very nature of the institution to put down the questioning and challenging and investigating that godly and mature people will naturally need to do.
Am I saying that the institutions are sold out to wickedness? Well, some of them may be—and that’s bad—but the bigger problem lies in the fact that almost none of the institutions are sold out to righteousness. And when I say “almost none”, this is me being very diligent not to rule out the possibility, even though I don’t personally know of any who are not substantially compromised in this way.
This is what time it is in this world. And those seeking refuge from it will almost certainly not find authentic refuge in yet another institution. Rather, the proper refuge is in the scriptures themselves and in whatever fellowship we can find with other godly-minded believers, and, of course, in that heavenly kingdom to which we cannot go until we die.
However important “church” is, it was surely not intended to be made into an idol that takes the place of God in our devotion and obedience. And as long as the institutions continue to consider that their own teachings are more important than God’s teachings, is it not pretty clear that nothing good can come from this?
This article will stop far short of solving the whole “church” problem, but it aptly points out the nature of the widespread problem. And it’s at this point that much further study and understanding is needed. If the right solutions were simple, everyone (who wants better) would be doing them. And I think the main reason they are not simple is that we have got ourselves a church that is built on error after error, such that we cannot quickly understand the extent of it all. Our knee-jerk response to solving one error we do see for what it is may be to double-down on some other error we have long been making, and do not yet see for what it is. But not wanting to think the unthinkable—that we have got a lot of things wrong at once—we prefer the soothing assumption that we have only got a few things wrong—and more, that they’re probably not all that bad, and probably won’t require that much work to change them. And so we never get a very good “big picture” view of things, for fear of seeing what we might see—for fear of admitting just how bad things are.
And there’s more, for the one entity who will not want us to gain such a big picture view is the institution itself. It’s almost certain that if maintaining our loyalty to our institutions is a priority, we will never come to see the big picture for what it is. In other words, I think it’s still true, after all these centuries, that:
“Bad company corrupts good character.”
1 Corinthians 15:33
They may try to intimidate you with charges of “Pride!”, or to flatter with you the appeal to “stay and help fight for change”, but in neither case does the institution want to change. And even if you decide to trust them, time will tell whether it’s true. And I hope you’ll be honest in your assessment of it.
Meanwhile, however, the truth of God’s word is still calling to those who want to be righteous, “Come out from them and be separate.” And you still have to choose whether to obey it or not.
It’s at this point that so many simply decide to prioritize the commands of God, as if one can get all his righteousness from obeying the one, even if while disobeying another. For example, they may suddenly decide that “unity” is the most important thing—in which case they compromise the truth on certain matters in order to be “unified” with the institution. (Notice that it’s never the institution rushing to be unified with the individual, but always the expectation that the individual is the one who must yield.) Or perhaps it’s evangelism that’s suddenly the prime directive, and they make excuses for the bad doctrines, claiming that the only thing worth knowing is “Jesus Christ and him crucified” and the only thing worth doing is “preaching the gospel”. Or maybe it’s “love” or “service”—or whatever else. But at the end of the day, we have to answer to God for our choices.
“Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.”
1 Peter 1:17
Peter did not bid them to find a way to be comfortable, as if godly people actually belong in this world. No, he was straight-up with them that they were living as “foreigners” here. And this is where so many church institutions go wrong: they create a false life for the members, in which the truth Christian life is watered down to resemble the worldly life in most ways—enough that the members are still comfortable in certainly ungodly ways, and yet not so much that they can’t claim to be any different from the world at all. It’s a game of compromise they play, where Jesus plays no such game and offers no such option.
And for the record, I am not offering up some new institution to solve this problem for you. No, this is not an institutional problem, but a personal one. And the only way it’s going to get solved is for the individual to submit his own heart, mind, and life to Jesus’s teaching. And for that, no church institution is necessary. Many will think this heretical, but the facts are these: A human may read and reflect on the Bible, and may pray at will, and needs no church institution whatsoever for these activities. A man’s true religion is what happens in his heart and mind and his actions, and not what happens at his church.
The churches aren’t cranking out authentic believers like this, because that’s not what churches do. That’s not what they’re there for. You may find some at church who want to be like this, but not many who are very good at it—for how can anybody get good at it when it is discouraged at his church? And it’s in response to this point that the churches suddenly see the need to talk about the grave importance of “accountability”, and warn you of the very bad things that happen to “solo Christians”—as if you were already getting such edifying personal attention and help at church. It’s rather a poor argument to make, but it’s about all they have left to try to keep you there.
Kay and I left the institutions in 2002 and never looked back. We went home to study the Bible, and found it more edifying than the church institutions had ever been for us. It’s been over 20 years now, and while we certainly miss some aspects of it, we do not at all miss the constant strife over all the doctrinal and practical error that was germane to what “the church” does. We don’t believe that the Bible was meant to be only temporary. Nor do we believe that authentic fellowship was to be only for a time. But we do believe that that First-Century ekklesia of Jesus was very special in some ways, and was not intended to be a perpetual institution upon the Earth. The assumption that it was—along with the constant and unsolvable battles over how it should be conducted—have wrecked the spiritual lives of millions of Christians, and “the Church” has been idolized—prioritized over the truth in the scriptures—over the Way and the Image in which we are supposed to be living as actual devotees to Jesus’ teachings.
And if we have got it wrong about “the Church”, and if it’s still supposed to be running today, then let someone produce one in which plain, old-fashioned godliness typifies the teachings and practices alike. Please show us a church in which the sin of the leaders is not tolerated or swept under the rug. Please show us one in which doctrinal inconsistency is not ignored, but rectified. Please show us one in which the whole Bible is considered important, and is regularly studied and discussed. Please show us one in which new information is met with excitement, and not with the growling of the guard dogs and the presupposition that it is wrong, or is offered up with bad motives. Please show us a church that knows how to change its mind (repent) when it is wrong, rather than to double-down on its traditions.
From time to time, someone will dare to put forth his own church as an example of such, but to date, they have always been self-deceived about it, and their churches are not even close to what was taught and practiced in the First Century. But I do keep the door open in my mind, that someone might someday present just such a church that has jettisoned the institutional bad habits of the last 2,000 years, and has got it down to the original philosophy and way of life.
