The First Thing that's Wrong

Ken Eckerty has posted a website entitled "Why I left the Organized Church" (http://www.savior-of-all.com/organized.html). It gives 10 or more reasons, and I'd like to take them on. The first thing that's Wrong:

A narrow demand that believers worship in a certain way, believe in a certain way.

My response: He's right. Churches are firm believers in a slippery slope. You know how it goes, you start to slide, but the incline takes over, and before you know it you're at the bottom of the mountain, broken and dead. So churches figure out what they consider to be the true way to worship or believe (God's way?) and they stick to it. When their approach is challenged, they start thinking about the slope again, so their tendency is to make people toe the line.

Of course, there are several things wrong with the thinking in the previous paragraph:

1. Nobody can put all churches in the same basket. Some are more paranoid than others. Some aren't paranoid at all. For every bad experience with narrowness and control, there is some other church where people hang a lot looser.
2. The worship wars of the past are beginning to wane as contemporary styles begin to be embraced by young and old alike. True, it's not universally contemporary, but most Christians have found a style they like, in a church of their choice, so that no one is forcing them to worship in a certain way. Again, this isn't universal, but it's pretty common.
3. In the area of belief, I do think that our tendency to over-theologize does lock us into narrow systems (more on this in a later post). But we have to remember one thing - Because the Christian faith is based on what it believes to be a message from God (embodied in the Bible), churches will never be "everything goes" fellowships. Beyond all the arguments over theology and interpretation, there are certain bedrocks that must be there or we lose Christianity and replace it with something else.

Which leads me to ask the church - If we know who we are, why are we so fearful of flexibility in the things that matter less? Why do we try to force people into narrow moulds that simply drive them away? Why are we so based on rules, when Christ has made us free?