the ingrown church

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. - James brother of Jesus Christ

i see it everywhere...

..from the newspapers and tv, to the pulpits and suicide bombings; so many people all over the face of the earth justifying so many acts in the name of religion.

The Christian church is no exception. As a follower of Jesus, raised in the church, I have seen people mistreated, shunned and corrupted all because of religion. The religion I grew up with was that of Christianity. 

Now that I am older I look upon what the Christian church, as a whole, has become and I am saddened, saddened because I do not believe the church of today is the church that Jesus wanted His followers to be.

Even the word denotes the wrong meaning in the minds of people. Most people think that you go to church; they believe “church” is a place that people give money to and it gets bigger and better.

jesus did not refer to the church as a place but as a group of people 

By making church a place we abdicate our responsibility of being the church the six days of the week that we are not at the place, church. By making the church a place, you can justify decisions and actions based not in spirituality but in materialism all for the betterment of the “church”.

The world is not a better place because more tithe and donation money is poured into a building. I realize that believers need a place to meet and grow and worship God, but going with that rationale there are many other ways to achieve this goal than building a structure that stay practically empty over 75% of the week.

Without realizing, we as Christians have begun hiding ourselves inside the “church” in a holy huddle, we carryout all of our life’s activities in the place. We want to have a softball team so the church uses money to build a softball field, we want our kids to play basketball so we build a gym, we want a place to hang out and entertain ourselves so we build a family life center. We do all of this in the name of giving ourselves a spiritual oasis and safe place for our families to be in the midst of an evil world and society bound for hell. We take the tithe and put it toward building up the wall that surrounds our castle of Christianity.

Sure we say the doors are open to anyone that wishes to enter and we pray for them to come in droves but believe you me they are either turned off or intimidated by our campuses and compounds.

They are turned off by that fact that we claim to be doing God’s will inside of building that costs millions to build yet we scrounge to find money to give to the missionaries in the field and the community outreaches in our area.

They are repulsed at the idea of us giving money to build our Tower of Babel while within a five-mile radius of the church, people live in poverty and need.

the church isn’t a haven for the holy... it is a hospital for the hurting 

In the verse above James is saying God isn’t impressed with our just taking care of our own inside the church, no God wants the money and time spent investing into people, people that need help, people that need God.

We don’t need our own softball fields and workout centers, we need to go into the world to the gym down the street and through our lives share with the people in that place the love and truth of Jesus Christ.

The church is growing in and not out.

 I know how bad it is for one of my toenails to grow in and not out, strangely enough that idea applies to the church as well. 

We will only become infected, corrupted and unusable.

It is time we take back the meaning of the word church and return it to being about a people and not a place, a relationship not a religion.

We do not proclaim the love of Christ because He has made us better than the rest of the world. We do not proclaim the love of Christ because we are perfect and have a six-step plan to show others how to become perfect.

People are not led to Christ by our buildings or our budgets; nor are they impressed by what we do in the name of God.

None of that is the reason. No, people come to Christ for the same reason we did, because He becomes real in their life. So to mirror that we must to become real, and say that once and for all the church is a body of people forgiven not perfect that are striving to serve God by reaching out a hand those in need physically, mentally and spiritually.

yes this will make us uncomfortable. 

Yes this will cause us to do something other than show up on Sunday and be entertained by the preacher’s latest anecdotes. 

But this is true religion, this is true Christianity, this is the church.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless; like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." – Matthew the Levite, quoting Jesus Christ