God’s path for me has carried me places I could never have imagined.
I seldom found God in evangelical church activities, particularly during worship services. The first and greatest error Western Christians make is confusing emotionally moving music and preaching with a move of the Spirit. You can claim that emotion is just an outward symptom, but I will counter that it is the whole point of most Christian worship.
My mind does recall a few signal experiences here and there, little snapshots of moving experiences that happened in worship. But my spirit is another matter entirely. The snapshots that haunt me most are those when my mind and emotions were least satisfied. As I think back over all those years of attending church, volunteering and working, there were many moving moments. They make good stories, but they don’t change souls, only minds — that’s not enough. How do I tell you that the entire structure of Western evangelical church activity is aimed at creating a very human addiction? Even when the religious apparatchiks fail, the objective is often bluntly stated as creating an association in the minds of attendees that makes them want to come back for more of the same.
And what’s wrong with that? It’s just a whisker away from being exactly the same thing as any secular, godless TV show. The only difference is the religious branding at church. Both of them are channeling human attention into something that is actually harmful. Both of them are pulling on a human weakness, tools of the Devil.
To the degree I need the comfort of being around a small circle of friends, I can do that anywhere; it’s often much easier and more comfortable without the religious branding. The conformist structure of every church means I can’t be myself because something demands I be a different self with only a pretense what God says He wants. In a secular setting there are fewer expectations.
Not lower expectations, as many evangelicals assume, but simply less. Western Christianity is just a different flavor within the narrow range of Western culture. You miss the point when you suggest that Christianity as a cultural milieu is the crutch we cripples need; that metaphor is all wrong. Following Christ is meant to heal us morally; the emotional and psychological healing is just a consequence. The moral shaping we need cannot come from any part of conforming to Western Civilization. Your evangelical conformity ends up serving as anti-Christlike because Christianity is an Eastern religion and so God intended it to always be. Western Christianity is western, but hardly Christian.
That peculiar Hebrew intellectual approach is the very closest on earth you can get to the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet our Western Christian theologians look back through the mists of time and, lacking discernment, lump that Hebrew tradition with all the other Eastern viewpoints as superstitious and inferior. They reject the idea that the West is a perversion. Instead they promote this very crippling infection throughout the world when they pretend to bring the gospel.
Your Western Christian “different” moral viewpoint isn’t different enough from the world. A change in mere intellectual and emotional content is not enough difference. The difference in moral structure is artificial and shallow. It has become no more than another structured social activity in which we are all good acquaintances, not spiritual family. Because the shallowness is enforced, we come away with just a hint of what it could be, and we are not filled. But church typically insists you are being filled, so we keep going back, trying to find whatever it is that is supposed to be filling. Maybe we convince ourselves it’s working, but if it does, our needs aren’t that great. It makes church just one alternative social circle among many.
Don’t offer me a mere psychological conversion; don’t tell me spiritual birth is a decision. Paul said all too plainly in Romans that no human has the ability to even want spiritual awakening. It can come only from above. When it does, it demands a rather substantial moral shift that Western Christianity has never made. Church keeps working on the wrong level, somewhere far below the requirements of actually walking with Christ.
I’m not there yet, but this path is so very long because everything that should be ahead of me was built behind me by fools who compromised with the world.
