I Survived the Christian Right: Ten Lessons I Learned on My Journey Home
Lesson 3
Leave Churchianity
Surprise! Jesus didn’t found an institutional church.14 For that matter, he didn’t found a religion either. He also didn’t expect his followers to set up a Christian version of the synagogue, let alone create a parallel Christian universe where microbrews are banned.
When I worked on a church planting team in Malawi, Africa in the 1990s, I studied the early church and began to realize how unbiblical our modern concept of church is. I came to see that professional salaried clergy, a clergy-laity distinction, meetings in buildings, church budgets, hierarchal leadership, and legalistic requirements, such as tithing, were not present in early Christianity. Frank Viola and George Barna make the case that most of these elements of church were borrowed from pagan culture.15 That doesn’t make them necessarily evil, just not based on the original, and not the model for Christian fellowship. The word translated “church” is the Greek ecclesia, which simply means “gathering” and does not denote an institution. The same word is used for a “mob” in the book of Acts.16
Evangelical churches routinely espouse modern church membership and active involvement as God’s only way of building the Kingdom and creating mature believers. I recently heard a pastor describe his love for the institutional church in terms normally used for ascribing worship to God.
Undoubtedly, there are churches that are healthy places to grow spiritually, but my experience also reveals how prevalent spiritual abuse is found in fundamentalist and evangelical churches. One could argue that the doctrine of the institutional church is largely to blame for abuses. Why? It promotes churchianity…the practice of making belief in Jesus largely focused on the habits and demands of the institutional church (doctrinal purity, religious behavior), rather than on God’s love. Churchianity encourages authoritarian leadership, which is at the core of spiritual abuse. It also doesn’t encourage people to think for themselves. Blind compliance is sure to follow. “Evangelicals are enamored with power and control. That’s why numbers and measures are so important to evangelicals, and why compliance is next to godliness.”17
Don’t put up with churchianity.
[14] Wills, Garry, Op. cit. page 78.
[15] Viola, Frank and Barna, George, Pagan Christianity, page xix.
[16] Wills, Garry, What Jesus Meant, page 78.
[17] Mike Yaconelli, in The Post Evangelical by Dave Tomlinson, page 28.
“It promotes churchianity—the practice of making belief in Jesus largely focused on the habits and demands of the institutional church (doctrinal purity, religious behavior), rather than on God’s love. Churchianity encourages authoritarian leadership, which is at the core of spiritual abuse. It also doesn’t encourage people to think for themselves. Blind compliance is sure to follow.” For me this statement is correct based on my long life in churches, good churches where I learned much and loved dearly. However, I think any church today has room for improvement. Any denomination has room for improvement. One of the things that I like about our particular Baptist church is our uniqueness. We are not part of the Southern Baptist Convention. Formally we are associated with the Northern Baptist Convention. However, each church stands alone. There is no “body” that tells us what we must believe or do. The weakness of any church, like us, is that we depend too much on the lead pastor. Not as a dictator of belief and policy, etc. but we just do not have enough input from the lay-folk, I’m not referring to just my congregation in this statement. We do a pretty fair job of incorporating the laity. We do however get too caught up in what I call “doing church” but is referred here as “Churchianity.” We can point to things such as our mission trips and contributions to missions and our once in awhile doing something for others as a group. But, our sense of and following through on social justice issues, etc. is very weak, in my church and many others. I agree that we and others do not do a good job of encouraging our memebers to think for themselves, Priest Hood of All Believers. Our Sunday School classes are not so much focused on theology as it is on the stories of the bible. We and others do not make much attempt at discovering who/what God is and come to our own understanding of that. Rarely do we say or offer an avenue to learn “theology” through study. Theological study, for me, is the pursuit of who/what God is and how God works in the cosmos and in humans and all creation. How does God love? How do we show others what that love is all about in today’s world. If we could find a good way to form small groups, not like our Sunday School classes today, but open and honest study and discussion about the love of God and how God works in this world today, the mystery that is God, etc. would be a beautiful thing to see. Now on each Sunday we have a different verse or verses of scripture and we mostly hear a teacher tell us what that means. Why have something different every Sunday? Why can’t we have one thing that we pursue for several Sunday’s, months even that would allow time to help us to come to some decisions about what we believe on our own. We should also learn during this same time how to live out what we have learned. Sharing our stories, experiences of God that relate to what we are studying. Back to laity envolvement ! We have numerous committees, etc. made up of laity that “run” the business of the church and decide the mission efforts of the church. There are care teams that perform missional outreach to folks in our church as needed. So, the laity are really involved and our pastor does not tell us what to do. Those decisions are made by us. Laity, in our church, has a lot of freedom and responsibility and we love that about our church. In worship, the laity once again is part of our worship team. That too can be improved. On occassion we have a lay person to share an experience of God’s love with us from the pulpit but not often. That is a good start for us. I hope that our “doing” church will become less of a focus and our being more intentional and loving and reaching out more, will be the “norm.” I would like to see churches become more creative in all things and that means pastors and laity coming together and brain storming and also allowing God’s Holy Spirit to guide us more in all that we say and do. Love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, transformation, steadfastness, prayer, mission outreach are themes that we can study and learn how to practice God’s love in the world for the healing of this world.
Jo Ann,
Sounds like your church is heading in a good direction and your laity involvement is more healthy than most. I’m exploring ideas of how to have community outside institutional church walls, not that everyone abandons what we call church, but that people recognize that it’s not the only way and so much of its structure is not even biblical. The communities or gatherings would have no professional leaders and would gather around a theme that everyone has a passion for, e.g. youth mentoring, helping the homeless, aid to developing countries, microfinance programs, creation care, overcoming depression, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Michael, are you a pastor? If not now, have you been? Does this exploration of yours include others? Would your community be a faith based community that is non denominational or associated with a denomination but just not have an institutional church building? Even though you say there would be no “professional” leaders, it seems to me that you will need leadership of some sort. Will you gather and then decide those that would be leaders or facilitators? If you gather around a theme, it also appears to me that you would need a facilitator for each team. Tell me a little more about your ideas as I find this fasinating.
For historical treatment, see The New Restorationists: A Critique of Frank Viola and George Barna’s “Pagan Christianity?”, By Albert McIlhenny.
If Jesus didn’t found a religion or an institutional church of any sort, none of his followers understood him and the entire NT is a record replete with misunderstanding, and constitutes little more than baseless, false claims, perhaps intermixed with some actual sayings (and a great many forged ones). Why are the apostles engaging in liturgical worship in Acts? What’s the point of baptism? Why all the talk of “elders?” What to make of the various apostles, prophets, and teachers? How do you explain Matthew 18:18-20?