Onward, Forward, Toward…

Dan over at Cerulean Sanctum has an interesting article entitled Eschewing Church that is discussing why people are leaving the churches.

I, like Dan, have not dropped out but struggle with the ’square peg / round hole’ mentality that I am seeing. I am not seeing the modern church raise up disciples of the Gospel. Instead, I am seeing the modern church manufacture clones of agendas where everyone has to be exactly alike and difference is seen as deviance. From the ‘theo-political’ concept to the success driven anointing to the dobsonite large homeschool Republican Jesus families, I see no room for the different. Instead of unity, there appears to be unanimity at work.

Instead of worship that sets people free to discipline themselves in order to focus in and listen to the word of God, there is entertainment that appeals, encourages, and caters to the attention deficit disorder generation. Instead of an expository sermon, there is a pop-psychology talk that tickes the ears and does not feed the soul. Vision turned into agenda. Revelation turned into preconceived programs designed to obtain the deisred result at all costs. Hearing and doing turned into consultations. Feeding the poor, protecting the widowed, and fathering the orphans turned from a cause to obey the Scriptures into an effect explaining why the poor, widowed, and orphans are in their state of being (aka ‘lack of faith’, ’secret sin’, did not vote republican, disagree with the televangelist’, did not put enough money in the offering plate).

Like Dan stated in his article, there is a lack of balance called the middle ground. On one side you have the side that is deeply devoted to the Word but do not yield to the Holy Spirit. On the other side, we have people who value experiences over Scripture and label people who read the word as ‘intellectual humanists’.

In fact, where is the Word spoken in most churches today? Some of the Reformed preach and quote more from the catechisms and confessionals than the Bible. Some of the fundamentalists preach more from the life works of Bob Jones, Jack Hyles, and Jerry Falwell than the Bible. Some of the pentecostals preach more from what God did in an hot sawdust brush arbor campmeeting in 1909 than the Bible. Some of the charismatics preach more from an experience that gave them goose bumps and an esoteric revelation than the Bible. Most evangelicals preach more from the platform of the Republican party and a Fox news “ALERT!!!” interpreted and perspected by key evangelical leaders as God’s own beliefs than the Bible.

Maybe this is what happened. Instead of arguing over which version of the Bible is being used, maybe we should analyze if we are even using the Bible at all in the church. Maybe that is why many are turning away. they come to hear the Bible and instead get some other position paper.