Seeds of Reformation
Church as I knew it to be...
"Church as I Knew It to Be", is a phrase I use to distinguish what I experienced as a leader in a local church to what I have come to know now, about Christ, His Kingdom and being a part of the Church He is building. It is distinguishing phrase that helps me explain the change in me and what I have come to believe. I have no animosity to the people of faith today, nor do I want to disparage my history within the local church. It was a valuable time and gave me a beginning to living a life of faith.
But what learned had some incomplete messages which led to a skewed understanding of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, the mandate of the church, soul and Spirit, salvation, etc....
I observed inconsistencies between what I read in Scripture about a life of faith and what I was experiencing among the people of faith. Despite our best efforts to be effective, the biggest question for me involved the actual ineffectiveness of the church even with periodic revivals and camp meetings and our best programs. It seemed to make little of no difference within the locality, let alone create change in our nation.
The easy answer was to say that things were only going to get worse, so the inconsistencies were related to end times and the anti Christ....etc...This answer absolved me of being accountable to finding out if maybe I was misunderstanding something. I could sit back and just "do the best I know how" because there wasn't anything I could do about it anyway.
But this view required that I ignore the inconsistencies I was seeing and concede to the view that I would never know the truth nor would I be victorious over my personal struggles because after all, I was just a sinner, right?
As I travel and speak with people I have found my experiences and the inconsistencies I saw, are not unique to me or my situation, regardless of the country. People everywhere are discovering that the "Church that Jack or Jane has built" have somehow lost their ability to speak to the current generations unless they compromise with the prevailing cultural norms and try to incorporate them into Church life.
In doing this we lose our sense of “true north.” The measure used to find our boundaries in pleasant places is lost among the shifting sands of cultural relevancy and what it means to love and communicate the Love of Christ. As a result the gospel that Jesus and the Apostles taught is compromised, truncated, bastardized, so as not to “offend” and avoid the uncomfortable topics that hold us accountable to the Word of Faith. It is in this sense that we have learned to avoid the uncomfortable truths (to the world) of Christ, His Kingdom and what it means to believe.
Dear Reader, The gospel of Christ offends. It offends the feelings of souls that have their own agendas apart from the will of God and do not want to consider they may be mistaken. It happened in Jesus' day, and it happens now. It will always offend those who are determined to follow after their own agendas.
The biggest obstacle, my friend, is when we think we are right in our misconceptions.
Grace and Peace (wholeness)
Anne
