My brother and I were talking the other day. He was telling me about going to another church one Sunday morning. He said that it suddenly struck him how each church has to have their own little idiosyncrasies about the way they are different from other denominations. This one had a special set of rules about baptism that they thought they were right about, and everybody else wrong. It got me to thinking about other asinine rules that denominations have had in my church experience. Here's a few that I have encountered (each of these is true, by the way):
"You have to baptised at our church, and by immersion, because that's what the Bible says." (Evidently God will be checking to see if we do everything right - and we get extra points if we do it all the 'right' way.)
"You can't serve in this church if you aren't a member." (This happened after I had been serving for almost 5 years and refused to join the club)
"Women can't teach men at our church. They need be be under authority." (Interesting that women could teach males if they were kids, but not if they were adults who acted like kids.)
"You can't drink, buy things on Sundays, or go to movies if you attend our church." (Jesus never went to movies, he just told parables that were like movies. And he didn't shop on Sundays, he worked. And EVERYBODY knows that the host of the feast at Cana was talking about grape juice - they really were just having a good time on Welches.)
"If you don't tithe at least 10%, you can't be considered for leadership. After all, Jesus tithed." (We'll ignore the fact that what Jesus did was find a fish with a coin in it's mouth and suggested that it ALL be given, not just 10%).
I could go on and on, and become even more sarcastic about the stupid things that churches do. I am going to choose to not do that right now because it still makes me really angry, and I don't want to give the institution any more power to ruin my life. Instead, I want to use the frustration to live different.
I ask myself what stupid rules I have. What idiosyncrasies do I heap onto others in some vain attempt to change them into someone I want them to be? How do I live as I try not to create in my own heart the First Church of Stupid? Do I do really empty rituals just because I am supposed to do them? And what boxes do I still put God in?
I find that I am discovering Papa in a whole new way outside the First Church of Stupid. But I also find that some 'stupid' still lingers in me. Nice to know that Papa loves me, whether I got stupid all over me, or whether I have found a way to have it surgically removed. Because I am learning that we can do and be stupid all day if our faith is about us. When we shift to focusing only on Him, something new begins to happen - maybe despite us.
So here's to the First Church of Stupid in my own heart, with ever decreasing attendance!
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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2 comments:
Hi Mike, This is Sue I joined in on your conference call a couple of weeks ago about why I don't want to go to church. I was talking to a woman I work with yesterday, she is jewish and had just been made President over her synagog and was having trouble with a couple of women who work in the office of the synagog who didn't want to follow her instructions. She also mentioned that some people were against having someone on their board who hadn't been a member of their synagog for a certain length of time. She was wanting some people on the board that had business experience. Later after I had talked to her I started thinking about the ''church'', how we've made it into a business. I kept thinking, where was God in all of this. I'm so thankful I'm not involved in budgets, programs, committees.... It broke my heart and I imagine Papa's too that we took something so powerful, good and loving and turned it into just another club or business. I've been wondering about something...back in Acts where it talked about 5,000 people being saved on one day, and 3,000 on another day. You don't hear about things like that these days. We've taken the power out of God's Word, now adays ministers go online to look up sermons, or there's a calendar they follow to tell them what they are going to preach about on a certain Sunday. Then then practice and practice on how they sound, and throw in a few jokes. Back during the time the first church came together, they just spoke what God put on their hearts and those words had power to change lives. We complain about the government taking God out of schools and such.....we as Christians have taken God out of the church. How very sad.
Thanks Mike for having a place to sound off.
Yeah, that 'stupid' is hard to remove, like honey on a biscuit, it just seems to seep into our pores. I think it takes a deep inner detox cleanse to get it out.
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