This is fantastic!

I had lunch last week with an elder from the last institutional church that I was a part of when I left the system three years ago. For him, nothing has changed. He considers me to be in rebellion to Christ's calling to be a church member and be in subjection to its leadership, even though no such calling exists. On the contrary, we are called as Christians to be unified in the Spirit yet church leaders often see their role as to keep the purity of their theology (which they call "faith") and they continually divide the church over inconsequential issues.

The saddest part of my lunch with my friend is that he doesn't know his Scripture, nor does he have any real interest in it. When I told him that he puts more faith in his creeds, catechisms, and confessions than he does in the Bible then he pushed back on me. His gave me his best "building on the shoulder of giants" speech and said that he didn't want to "re-litigate" his interpretation of Scripture each time an issue came up. Re-litigate? Really?!?! How sad that an elder in the church can't be bothered to discuss the Bible with us "mere mortals" (aka laity).

It took me a couple of years to get over my need to trust human institutions for guidance on God's will and instead rely on the Holy Spirit. A friend of mine recently said that if you've been broken by God to the point where you hate and weep over your own sins then you truly have the working of the Holy Spirit within you. Yet the institution requires that you tick off a bunch of checkboxes in order to be saved. The spirit of the Pharisees is alive and well in the modern-day church.

When I look at the current state of Christendom, I can draw parallels to the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land. Weary and hungry, they would come to Moses complaining about their lack of food and would say that they wanted to return to Egypt. They were willing to enslave themselves yet again for a few morsels of food rather than wait to possess the "land flowing with milk and honey". The modern-day church is a tyrannical system which enslaves those who are a part of it to follow only the leading of those who run it. Instead, Christ is calling us to a life of love and service that is buried deep within today's churches. It is only by God's grace and mercy that His message of salvation in Christ shines through all of the nonsense that is we experience when we go to "church". My prayer is that God continues to call His people out of the system and into real fellowship free of all of the rules, just as He did with me. And I believe that the "seniors" are an important part of that transition. The idea of ordination or the clergy/laity distinction needs to disappear.

So now would you like to know what I really think? :-)