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Posts Tagged ‘fellowship’

What is Church?

Posted in christian living, Community, Ekklesia, tagged , , , , on July 18, 2014| 17 Comments »

My wife and I have for years ‘gone to church’ Sunday after Sunday. We sat in a pre-planned service, being entertained, listening to one person tell us what God was saying, and looking at the back of the head of the person sitting quietly in front of us.

Each week we sat there, not having the opportunity to say what was on our minds, no chance to talk and get to know our brothers and sisters sitting all around us. We were told we were having good fellowship and teaching, learning more about God each week.

Truthfully, we were getting so tired of this religious social club environment. We were not getting anything out of this experience, and we certainly were not putting anything into it…..other than our money when the offering basket went past. We have become tired of the religious enterprise with its pre-planned services, the CEO and board of directors, along with the gimmicks and programs designed to ‘bring the people in’, especially when we were told to go out into the world. We were feeling a lot like what our friend Kenn Bruner said in one of his postings… people “who are tired of a predictable and ‘business as usual’ mundane and mediocre existence as a Christian; those tired of sitting in a church pew Sunday after Sunday in their “comfortable and safe” place, bored to tears”.

What we are finding is that true community is believers living their daily lives with one another by caring, loving, assisting, encouraging, and building one another up. This is what is known as the true Church. It is fellow believers living daily for Christ, not a once a week trip to a building and sitting there for an hour. As Ken Eastburn said in one of his postings… “Organic house churches are different than Bible studies or small groups as to fellowship and caring for one another. Meeting together once a week to study and discuss the bible is fine, but an authentic family of God is different. It goes deeper. Coming prepared to meet the needs of others, even when it is inconvenient, demonstrates the love of Christ”.

We are followers of Christ, going about our normal daily business, living with Christ as our head….not a pastor. We live as one with Christ, letting his life and love touch others each and every day. We assemble with our brothers and sisters in Christ any day, anywhere. Sunday is not the Lord’s day, every day is the day the Lord has made. God’s house is not a building where we gather with people who believe similar to the way we believe. God’s house is us, His people, those of us who have accepted His grace. We are called to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves, not just those who believe like we do.

It has been good for my wife and me to stop being part of the Sunday morning crowd at the building of our choosing. It has us looking to God more, listening for His voice and allowing the Spirit to teach us rather than one man. It has us loving and accepting people as they are, not just those who believe like us. The Church is meant to be a community, living, loving and caring for one another each and every day. Although we have not yet found what we are looking for, we are trusting God to lead us and bring us into a community of believers he has for us. As Dan Notti said in one of his postings… “Believe God for it. Authentic community is God’s intention for believers. He has made the provision for it through the work of his Son and the power of the Holy Spirit, and He has the patience and love to stand with us as we experiment with living into it. Can we believe him for that”?

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We Aren’t Going to Agree

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , , , , on June 25, 2014| 8 Comments »

Is it aggravating to anyone else, or is it just me? I mean the fact that no matter what you believe, what your interpretation, someone always has a completely opposite view.

You get excited about hearing some truth that really connects, and the next thing you read an article by another Christian that completely disagrees with what you just heard.

Even more than that, most of us Christians get mad when someone disagrees with us and is different. We get on Facebook and make ourselves look crazy because we talk about brotherly love, then we fight and argue with someone because they interpret things differently….and mostly about things we can’t prove one way or the other.

We really have to stop and think that whatever it is we believe, whatever our interpretation, everyone is not going to agree with us. There is no reason for us to get mad at someone else for being different.

This life is all a matter of faith. No matter what it is spiritually speaking, no one can really prove what is right and what is not. Just because someone has a different interpretation doesn’t mean they are right or wrong.

We need to keep our ears open to the leading of the Spirit, and follow on our own path looking to Jesus. That does not mean any and every path is the right one, but we can’t be the judge of who is right and who is wrong. Jeremy Myers, in his book ‘Dying to Religion and Empire’ states, “The beautiful thing about following Jesus is that while He leads us all in the same direction, there are millions of different paths He can take to get us there. His goal, of course, is to advance the Kingdom of God on earth through the people of God who are being conformed into the image of God”. We need to follow Christ as he leads us individually, and then be ready to love all people, no matter if they are on the same path or not.

Let’s stop arguing, fighting, and demanding that everyone agree with us, and love those we meet along the journey. I think God is big enough to lead us all to His truth in His timing.

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Whose Way is Right?

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , on May 28, 2014| 14 Comments »

Why is it that we Christians can’t seem to accept one another?

My wife and I grew up in the organized church, and we have many friends who are part of the four-wall system. Yet, after many years of feeling uneasy, questioning, thinking there has to be more than just sitting in a pre-planned service every week, we decided to look for fellowship elsewhere. We feel sitting in a service every week, listening to someone else tell us what they think God is saying is really not very biblical.

The Bible talks about the priesthood of ALL believers. 1 Peter 2:5, 9. It talks about when we assemble, each one has something to say. 1 Corinthians 14:26. We say we are going to the Lord’s house, yet the Bible says we are the temple of the Holy Spirit 1 Corinthians 6:19.

Truthfully, how much fellowship do you get sitting in a service, looking at the back of someone’s head? The most fellowship I remember in a situation like that was when the pastor told us to get up and shake somebody’s hand. I don’t call that fellowship.

We are finding more fellowship outside the walls of organized church when we meet with other Christians during the week. We meet in houses, cafes and restaurants. We talk about what God is doing and what grace means to us. We are getting to know one another, we pray for one another and care about each other. Open discussion makes more sense to us rather than just sitting, listening to one person talk.

People say by not going to church, we are disobeying the Bible where it says to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together. We always ask where it says that it has to be in a particular place on a particular day in an organized service. It doesn’t say that, and meeting anytime two or three come together, talking, praying, enjoying each other is a more meaningful assembly to us.

I say all of this to ask this question, why can’t we accept each other at the place we are currently in our walk with God. It doesn’t make a difference if you go to church or not, if you think of Sunday is a holy day or not. It’s OK to think of every day as the Lord’s day and not just Sunday, or to realize church isn’t a building you go to but a people, saved by grace, living their lives for God daily.

If we could realize God is working in each of us in different ways. We are at different stages in our walk with Him. We all aren’t going to be the same. Let’s accept each other and not try to force our way of thinking on everyone else.

God is our focus. Loving Him and loving each other is what we are commanded to do under the New Covenant. Other than that, we should let our way of doing things be just that…our way. We should not expect everyone to agree with us.

None of us have it all figured out. None of us are right on everything. Many interpretations and ideas in the Bible will never be known this side of heaven, yet we get mad at other Christians when they see things differently. Let’s just accept each other in the love of Christ, realizing that He is in control and He will lead us into His truth in His timing. It isn’t our job to force others to see things our way. It is our job to love each other, accept each other and pray for one another. God will do the rest.

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Who are You…Really?

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , on May 14, 2014| 6 Comments »

Have you ever sat down and asked yourself this question….who am I? Not necessarily the ‘who am I, why am I here’ question, but who is the real me.

A couple friends and I were talking recently and we got on this subject. We were asking each other who truly knows us, the real us.

Most of us really aren’t known by those whom we have a casual relationship, and really, most of us aren’t deeply and truly known by those few people we consider close, intimate friends.

We are good at putting on the proper mask to hide the real us when we are around others. I do it, you do it, pretty much all of us do it. There is something down within us that feels if people knew the real us, they wouldn’t like us or accept us. I’m not sure why that is, other than a natural feeling from way back when Adam and Eve tried to hide from God.

Fortunately, our Father isn’t like that. He truly loves us. Even if we aren’t completely open with Him, He knows more about us than we know ourselves….and He still loves us.

If we could just get to the point to not worry about what everyone else thinks about us and know we are loved by God no matter what, I think our relationships with each other would actually improve. We could be ourselves, open and honest, and not store up all the frustrations, questions, lonely feelings and junk we all think.

If each of us could be more like our Father and love each other no matter what, our fellowship together would be so much better. No more putting on masks, no more covering up things we don’t want others to know.

Now truthfully, if that will ever happen this side of heaven, I don’t know, but it certainly is a goal to shoot for. I am so thankful we have a Father who loves us no matter what. We don’t need to put on a mask and hide our true self from Him. He knows us and loves us just as we are. Now, if we could just be the same with each other.

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Healing Divisions in the Body of Christ

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , , , on April 17, 2014| 28 Comments »

It’s sad that Christianity is divided into so many different groups. We all have a little different interpretation of the bible and a little different understanding of doctrine. Obviously we are not going to agree on everything, but we certainly should be able to love one another and accept each other even when we differ on these things.

It’s hard to understand why this is when God tells us we are to be one, as Jesus and the Father are one. Yet, we understand that we are human and it is easy to lose sight of our first love. If we could only stay focused on Christ, listening for his voice and the guidance of the Spirit, loving God and loving others as God intended, then we could look past our differences.

The problem seems to be that we are unwilling to see any other viewpoint other than our own. There are those such as my wife and I that do not attend an organized “church”. There are those who attend a “church” every time the doors are open. Some attend a house church, some meet with fellow believers at cafe’s, parks, restaurants and others meet in their homes over dinner. We should accept these differences and love one another rather than argue over who is right and who is wrong.

There really is not a right or wrong way to assemble together and we need to stop expecting everyone to do things exactly the same way. We should respect others viewpoints and focus on loving them rather than expecting them to see things ‘our way’.

Things will not change until we start focusing on what is common in our lives rather than the differences. The common focus should be on Christ, the head of the body. After that, we should focus on loving others rather than arguing about the differences in interpretation.

We also need to keep in mind that we are all constantly changing as God brings new truth to us. We are all learning and changing as we are ready to accept new truths. The interpretations I had five years ago are completely different from some of the interpretations I have now. I’m sure in another five years they will change again as God leads me into more truth.

Sometimes we are afraid to accept others interpretations because we feel if we do not hold to our way of thinking, we are compromising and not standing up for what we believe. We do not have to give up how we interpret the bible, but neither should we think everyone else is wrong. Besides, we really are not responsible for convicting people of sin, or leading them into truth, or even saving them. That is the job of the Holy Spirit. We are told to love God and love others.

When we realize we are each equally important functioning parts of the body, and Christ is the head, we can start to change how we feel about those who don’t see things exactly the way we do. We can begin to accept our brothers and sisters in Christ as they are, as we realize we are walking as one with God together.

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This post was a Guest Post at Gods Leader
You can view it at http://godsleader.com/healing-division-in-the-church/

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Here’s a list of bloggers contributing posts related to ‘Healing the Divides’ for April on Synchroblog:

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New Life

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , , on March 19, 2014| 13 Comments »

At this time of year, new life is a welcome sight. Trees start budding, plants start showing signs of life, the grass starts to green up. It is a good time of year.

Spiritually speaking, for my wife and myself, this is a time of new life also. Not in the sense of rededication or recommitting our life to God, but of a new way of looking at things, of new truths being revealed.

We both grew up in organized religion and followed certain doctrines and specific beliefs. After nearly 58 years in the system, our dissatisfaction with what we were seeing, and many questions we had about some of the things we had been taught, finally brought us to a point of leaving.

Having been out of organized religion for a year now, we have found that it is a time of new life for us. We have a new dependency on fellowship with the Father and with other brothers and sisters, even though it is outside the four walls of what we call church.

It is a time of new life in the way we think of church. What we had always thought of church is really not so. Church is the body of believers, each fulfilling an equal function in the body, with Christ as the head. It is not a building we attend once a week for a pre-planned religious service.

We have new life in our learning process, open to let the Spirit teach us and not settle for a specific doctrine or belief system based on what a particular denomination has told us. We had many things that bothered us and caused questions that just didn’t make sense, but we are finding new life knowing that God is within us and that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to rely on a man or woman to teach us. We can listen and hear the leading of the Spirit for ourselves.

We have come to realize the new life we have in the New Covenant. No longer do we need to try to mix the old covenant law with new covenant grace. We now depend on Jesus, and Him alone, as our all in all. He lives within his followers and is the living, inerrant Word of God. We have the mind of Christ, and the Holy Spirit within us teaching and guiding us.

We’ve found new life in fellowship. We had such a hard time finding true fellowship within the four walls. We’d sit for an hour looking at the back of someone’s head, listening to a man or woman tell us what they thought God was saying. Fellowship normally doesn’t happen at a typical church service. We’ve found more fellowship going about our daily business, knowing that God is within us. He brings other brothers and sisters along that we wouldn’t find while sitting in a meeting. We each have a small group of fellow believers that we meet with regularly and have really come to know what fellowship is meant to be.

We know everyone isn’t going to agree with what we are finding to be good for us. A lot of people want the organized meetings. There is nothing wrong with that if that is what you want for now. But we have found new life being outside of organized religion and traditional church. For us, this is so much better and we’re finding some of the questions that were bothering us actually have been answered. Some things make so much more sense now. Of course, there are still many questions, but rather than beat ourselves up over trying to make sense of everything, we’ve accepted that God is in control. We’re not going to know everything or have the answers to everything. We each learn over our life-time, and as God reveals new truths to us.

It is also a time of new life in the way we accept others and let Christ live and love through us. We can love and accept people the way they are. We can be loving and kind and not condemning. As followers of Christ, we are all at different stages in our walk with God.  We aren’t on different levels, as we feel all of us have equally important functions in the body, with Christ as our head.

Actually, each day is a time of new life. Stop looking to man, and man-made institutions to be your link to God. The Father says that we are now one with Him. Let Christ live through you every day and listen for the Spirit to teach and guide you as you go about your daily routine.

 

This post is part of the March Synchroblog, ‘New Life’, which can be viewed here
http://synchroblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/link-list-march-2014-new-life/

K.W. Leslie – Sin Kills; God Brings New Life
Carol Kuniholm – New Life. Mystery Fruit.
Jeremy Myers – I Get Depressed On Facebook
Glenn Hager – A Personal Resurrection Story
Loveday Anyim – Spring Forth – Ideas That Speak New Life
Loveday Anyim – Inspired By Spring To Create A New Life
Sarah Quezada – Post Winter Delight
Edwin Aldrich – Finding New Life In Our New Home
Doreen A. Mannion – Each Day A New Decision: Choose Life
Kathy Escobar – new life through nonviolent communication
Anita Coleman New Life, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Eternal Living
Sonja Andrews Persephone
Mallory Pickering New Life Masterpiece Theater Style
Liz Dyer New Life, Empowerment and Dropping Keys

 

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One with God

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , , on February 13, 2014| 4 Comments »

A ​reader​ ​recently ​posted a reply to one of my articles, and it got me to thinking. We are taught from an early age in the christian religion that God is up there in heaven somewhere, looking down on us who live here on earth.

I can remember hearing so many times the pastor saying during a special service, God is going to show up and the spirit ​will fall, and we will have a special time of fellowship together.

So why is it we are told that God is up there and we are down here and he may show up now and then when the conditions are right? It just didn’t make sense.​

After some time ​of thinking about this​, it just didn’t feel right to think that God is going to show up only at certain buildings where people meet at set times, with set programs. God sent his Spirit to live within us all the time​.

Jesus prayed in John 17 that we are to be one as he and the father are one. The Spirit lives within us, which to me says God lives within us. We are merged together with Him. We are one with God as Jesus is one with God.

​W​hen​ two people marry​, God says they become one. So it is with God and us. When we put our faith in him and accept his free gift of grace, we become one. We are no longer separate individuals, we are one with God. We aren’t God, but we are merged together as one. We are the temple,​ or house of God.

I wanted a better way of saying what I felt, so I started saying I was a Christ follower. But as it ​was pointed out​ to me​, this still ​suggested​ a separation between God and us​.

​We have to get the religious thinking out of us and begin living the truth, that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. God is within us. There is no separation, no waiting on God to come down. We don’t have to follow and keep up with Christ. He is within us.​

We don’t have to wait until Sunday to go to a building for God to show up, that isn’t his house. We are the body of Christ, each of us are equally important parts. We are his dwelling place, each and every day.​

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A new year, a new beginning

Posted in christian living, tagged , , on January 21, 2014| 19 Comments »

As 2013 came to an end, my wife and my participation with the organized church also came to an end.

After so many years of feeling dissatisfied with organized religion, we decided to make a break from the traditions, rules, regulations and doctrines we each grew up learning.

It can be a scary decision to stop attending something that has been part of your life since you can remember. So many friends don’t understand why we made this decision. So many people who feel we are wrong and have fallen from grace.

Now let me say, neither of us think there is anything wrong with participating in organized fellowship. We do think we need to call it as it is, church is not a building or place we meet God. The Church is made up of each of us followers of Christ and it is a life-style that goes on day by day, anywhere, anytime.

God says we are now His temple and He lives within us, not a building made by hands.

Looking to the new year, we see it as a time of new beginnings with our walk with God.

We see this as a new start away from law-living and following man-made religion. It’s beginning a path walking with Jesus as our friend and partner in the grace and freedom He provided.

It is a walk consisting of loving God and loving others. Accepting all those we come in contact with each day. It is not a set of rules to follow, or things we need to do to be a better Christian.

It is coming to realize that what we do or don’t do, does not make a difference in our relationship to God. It is letting Christ live through us and letting His love touch people. It is knowing that Christ paid the price for our salvation and learning to live by grace, and grace alone, not by adding law and works.

After so many years of ‘going to church’ each Sunday, we don’t know for sure where the path will lead us in this new walk, but we know that we both feel closer to God. We feel a new dependency on fellowship with our Father and with fellow believers. We also feel a renewed sense of excitement now that we are out of the box of organized religion.

We look forward to see where God takes us and how He will touch people with His love as we walk with Him day by day.

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We are starting the year off with the theme of ‘New Beginnings’.  Here is the list of links for this month:

Jen Bradbury – Enough

Abbie Watters – New Beginnings

Cara Strickland – Bursting

Carol Kuniholm – Acorns, King, Beloved Community

Done With Religion – A New Year, A New Beginning

Kelly Stanley – A Blank Canvas

Glenn Hager – Overcoming The Biggest Obstacle To Reaching Your Goals

Dave Criddle – Get Some New Thinking

David Derbyshire – Changed Priorities Ahead

J A Carter – The Year of Reading Scripture for the First Time

Damon – New Beginnings: Consider These 5 Questions Before Tying The Knot

Jeffrey Kranz – Where To Start Reading The Bible

Joanna990 – On survival – my one word for 2014

K W Leslie – Atonement

Happy – my One Word 365 surprise

Michelle Moseley – Ends and Beginnings

Matthew Bryant – A New Creation

Liz Dyer – It’s a new year and time to make some new mistakes

Edwin Pastor Fedex Aldrich – Foreclosed: The beginning of a new dream

Jennifer Clark Tinker – Starting a New Year Presently

Loveday Anyim – New Year New Resolutions

Loveday Anyim – New Year Resolution Dreamers

Loveday Anyim – New Year Resolution Specialists

Loveday Anyin – New Year Resolution Planners and Achievers

Jeremy Myers – Publish Your Book with Redeeming Press

Amy Hetland – New Beginnings

Phil Lancaster – New Beginnings

Mallory Pickering – Something Old, Something New

Margaret Boelman – The Other Side of Grief

Kathy Escobar – One Image

Sarah Quezada – Which Comes First: The Beginning Or The End

Doreen Mannion – When It’s Over It’s Just The Beginning

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New Creatures in Christ

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , on December 18, 2013|

Colossians 3:5 Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. 9 Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, 10 and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him, 11 a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.

As followers of Christ, our old nature has been killed and buried. We have been raised up as new creatures in Christ. We no longer have to serve sin because Christ has set us free.

We have Christ living in us and we can rely on His power to overcome temptation by His strength. Even when we mess up, we can live a life free from the guilt and punishment of sin. (Not always the consequences, but the punishment has been satisfied).

When God looks at us, He sees Christ in us. We are now holy and righteous in His sight. Not because of anything we have done, but because of the work Christ did. We no longer have to work to earn salvation. It is a free gift provided through Christ.

In Christ, we are all brothers and sisters, there is no upper level or lower level Christians. We are all saved by grace, equal parts of the body and living under the headship of Christ. Christ is our all in all.

May we continue to grow in Grace and let Him have the preeminence.

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My Journey to Leaving Organized Religion

Posted in christian living, tagged , , , , on November 13, 2013| 71 Comments »

My history with organized religion began back when I was just a little boy. My parents were active members of their church and once I was born, they started taking me and I’ve been a part of the organized church basically since that time. I was saved in the church when I was 10 years old during Vacation Bible School. I was active in one way or another for years and years, so when I say I’ve grown to see church in a different way, you will know I am not someone on the outside knocking church.

I grew up in a Christian family and was one of the kids who never got in trouble, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t cuss, I was always in church whenever the doors were open. I actually got to thinking I might be one of God’s favorites….can you believe it?

Over the past several years, I’ve had a groaning deep inside about modern-day church. I’ve been feeling that something just isn’t right. What we call church today just doesn’t seem like what God intended.

I began going to church out of habit because it was the thing Christians do to show they were different than the world. I felt that if I didn’t do certain things that were considered wrong, and if I did good things and attended church, I would be pleasing to God.

People seem to make so much out of going to church. I noticed that Christians, myself included, seemed more interested in finding out where others went to church. If they went to the same type of church as we did, we felt they were alright. We would make sure and invite friends or non-Christians to church rather than talk to them about what Christ did for us. We felt it was the place of the church to do all the evangelism and witnessing. We thought that if we got them into church, the pastor would take care of everything.

I also spent a lot of time, as do a lot of people, working around the church or doing ‘church’ activities. It seemed like the more I went to church, or the more things I did, I felt like a better Christian. This is a problem today. People get more involved in working for the church, or for the pastor, that they no longer are doing things out of love for Christ, but out of love for things about Christ. Many people feel the more things they do for the church, or the more often they attend services, the closer they are to God. They feel guilty if they miss a service or are asked to do something for the church and they say no.

I started realizing that going to church was not the answer. There was certainly more to sitting there letting someone else tell me what God was saying through His word. I became very dissatisfied with the church and I kept telling my wife that there is something wrong with the way things are being done. Something just isn’t right.

Over the years I’ve seen all the fighting and arguing among church goers. If you go to a different denomination than someone else, seems like you just can’t get along because of the differences in interpretation and understanding of the Bible. I would think about the verse ‘By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:35 NASV) and wonder where is the love?

I see the mega-churches with all the glitz and glamour and wonder why all that money is going into a building, the pastor’s car, house and all the other expenses churches seem to require. I realize most churches give to other missions and other ministries, but it seems a very small percentage of the total giving actually go to ministries that help others.

All this has been weighing on me and I’ve been more and more uncomfortable sitting in church for an hour every week, looking at the back of the head of the person in front of me, being entertained and preached too. Then I’m told that this is good Christian fellowship, although I haven’t really talked to anyone during the entire service.

I have been struggling for a long time with my feelings and wondering what was going on with me. Was something wrong with my fellowship with God? Was I getting tired of church and Christianity after all this time? I can’t say there was any one event that made me feel this way, but it was a progression of events, thoughts, praying, reading, searching.

After all these years, I just couldn’t make any sense out of sitting and being entertained for an hour and then going home thinking I had fulfilled my Christian obligation. So much of the teaching in the church today is more or less telling us what we need to do and what we need to stay away from to make us ‘good’ Christians. While sitting in a service listening to this, it hit me that all this sounds a lot like the Law. I was feeling good about myself based on what I did or didn’t do, and how often I was in church. I got to thinking, didn’t Christ fulfill the Law? Wasn’t he the perfect sacrifice for us? Didn’t he put an end to the Old Covenant and begin a New Covenant of Grace? Why was the pastor still telling us we needed to follow the 10 Commandments and do things to earn God’s love? It just didn’t make any sense. Especially when reading verses such as Galatians 3: 23-26 But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

For such a long time, I’ve wondered if the issue I was having about organized religion and modern-day church was a spiritual problem or not, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had a legitimate complaint of how modern-day church was going.

The way I see it, God said that we, His people, are the temple of the Holy Spirit. To me that says that God lives in me, not in a building. He says we are all sheep and He is the Shepherd, not the person we call pastor that gets up each week and talks about what they think the Bible says.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of good things have happened in church over the years, and a lot of sincere people who love God and want to please Him are a part of organized religion. I feel the organized church of today is over emphasized, making people think that everything happens in church. We have to wait until Sunday for God to show up and do something. What happened to the fact that we, His people are the Church and we have a relationship with God every day. We can have an impact on those we come in contact with each day by the Spirit of God loving them through us. Why do we feel we have to get people to wait until Sunday to come to a building for God to do something?

Christians will dress up and act differently, saying they are going to God’s house, but don’t realize that God’s house is within us. God lives within us every day of the week and we no longer have to go somewhere to meet Him.

I also wondered why so many events and teachings of the church still seemed to center around Old Covenant living. We are saved by grace and nothing we do or don’t do makes a difference in our salvation. We can’t make God more pleased with us by doing things and we can’t make him not love us for not doing anything.

After some time of wondering and praying, I finally started coming across various other people, through books and web sites, that were feeling the same way as myself. I would read something that really agreed with my spirit and think, wow, that is exactly the way I’ve been feeling.

I think for me three things really aggravated me with the church. One was how I saw the way people looked up to the pastor and the leaders of the church. It seemed like they were almost on a different level than the entire congregation. That didn’t fit in with the verse ‘What is the outcome then, brethren? When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification. 1 Corinthians 14:26 NASV). Jesus is the head, we are the body. We should be letting the Spirit teach us and lead us, not another human being.

The second was the worship leader. I felt like he was telling me how to worship, when to raise my hands, when to do this and do that and basically trying to make me feel guilty if I didn’t respond. What happened to people responding out of genuine love for God and not because someone is trying to pump it up to make the worship team look good.

And the third is tithing. Tithing is an Old Covenant law and is no longer a requirement for living in Grace. I agree, we give out of love and according to how we feel God is leading us, but tithing as part of the law is done. The way I see it, the clergy needs to get paid, the mortgage has to be paid, the staff has to be paid, so they lead people on by saying tithing is still required and that just isn’t right.

My wife and I have stopped attending services for almost two years now. I have come to realize that what we call church is a good place for Christian people to get together socially, but it is not God’s house and it is not the Church. I know we need to continue to have fellowship with other believers, and pastors like to use the verse forsake not the assembling of yourselves together (Hebrews 10:25 NASV), but no where does the Bible say that has to be in a building on a certain day. Christians can fellowship anytime, anywhere. As the Bible says ‘for where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst’ (Matthew 18:20 NASV). I’ve heard of Christian groups meeting for Bible study in a bar as a witness to those who normally go there but who would not dream of walking into a church. Before we condemn this type of thing, we need to remember that Jesus, the Great Physician went to the sick. He didn’t wait for them to come to a building on a certain day. He went to the people who needed Him.

At times I still battle over leaving the church or to stay involved from time to time. I have so many friends that are part of the organized church and they just don’t understand my feelings. It’s almost as if I am out on my own when it comes to my friends and it makes me feel like it would be easier to keep my mouth shut and keep on attending services like normal. The problem with this feeling is, am I trying to please men or am I trying to follow the leading of the Spirit? I am fortunate to have my wife and a few good friends to meet with every other week who have the same feelings. I now know in my mind that I have not truly left church because I am a part of the Church, which is not a building we go to, but is the people of God who are saved by grace. I know that fellowship with other believers can take place anywhere and anytime. I am part of the Church every day no matter where I am.

If Jesus walked the earth today I’m not sure we would find him in church. He would be out meeting the people who most of the church crowd would not want to be associated. It was the religious leaders who were His biggest enemies in times past. I’m not sure it wouldn’t be the same today.

This post was a Guest Post at Gods Leader
You can view it at http://godsleader.com/my-journey-leaving-organized-religion/

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