Disillusionment, Christianity, & Jesus

I came to the conclusion last week that I’m no longer a Christian. I felt alienated from other Christians, I didn’t know of any evidence that the Holy Spirit was somehow at work in my life, and I certainly wasn’t getting anything out of reading the Bible or prayer. I hate worship songs and have never in my life felt a true sense of worship when I sing them. Hymns are too familiar to me and the beauty of their simplicity no longer enchants me. And I think that’s because God doesn’t intend for us all to worship him in the same way at the same time in the same place with the same people every week. The whole notion of church being integral to the Church has seemed more and more ridiculous to me as I grow increasingly uncomfortable and aggravated during church services.

Christianity is a religion, and Jesus didn’t come to start a religion. Quite the opposite, in fact; he came to dismantle religion, which is a man-made institution fashioned for the specific purpose of controlling people. This is raw human lust for power manifested under the guise of God-given mandate and it’s what Jesus died and rose again to abolish. Unfortunately we humans are susceptible to deny that which we desire and crave the most. So many of us settle for the mundane, working dull, predictable careers and getting married and having kids and “settling down” because we seek security in riches and success when we really just want the freedom to be who we are to the utmost. In other words, we want to be what God made us to be. We all have inborn passions and desires that drive us, as well as things that happen to us throughout our lifetimes that shape our attitudes and rationale. Are we supposed to turn our backs toward the things our souls cry out for the most in exchange for slavery to the assimilation machine which is modern Christianity?

Modern Christians are squares. L 7 wieners. Please forgive my cynical honesty. They try to exude a hip persona by reinventing the church experience, hiring a younger pastor who wears rectangular thick-frame glasses and doesn’t tuck his plaid shirt in to his cargo shorts, adding mood lighting and instruments to the band for a “richer” worship experience, or (my personal favorite) holding separate services to accommodate people who would rather their church experience be as dry as possible. Churches are like Starbucks; trying to reinvent their brand with new fixtures and furnishings in order to attract more people to what is most often a loosely-connected and harebrained monologue on Christian ethics that has little or nothing to do with the gospel.

Christians everywhere, I beseech you to be painfully honest with yourselves. Do you feel actual joy every Sunday morning, or even most Sunday mornings? Are you happy, having found a place where you not only realize who God is, but who you are? Or are you merely “churching by faith,” confident that somehow God will speak to you despite your inability to understand or resonate with anything the preacher is saying from week to week? When you open the Bible, do you go about it with excitement, knowing that you can and perhaps will learn something completely new? Or do you approach your Bible reluctantly, already convinced that you know what it will say and what it means, but you read it anyway hoping you’ll remember some belief about God that you either forgot or haven’t revisited in a while? When you pray, do you feel like you’re communicating with someone? Or do you feel like you’re merely practicing self-therapy, creating a conversation with yourself in your head that sometimes leads to enlightenment but most often leads to empty silence?

You might be one of those people who loves Chris Tomlin & co. and really gets a lot out of church every week. Obviously that model works for you, at least for the time being, and that’s wonderful. But you can’t expect it to work for everyone else. The Church is, first and foremost, a community of believers, and that’s something that can’t be fragmented by man-made divisions. Humans have tried with all their might to institutionalize Christianity ever since Christ’s ascension. The first experiment made Christianity a government organization, wherein a single central authority dictated the practices of every Christian; what kind of music and clothing was permissible, what language should be spoken, which passages should be read, etc. With the Reformation came the radical discovery that you don’t have to be Catholic in order to know the gospel. Unfortunately they didn’t quite abandon the church model, instead attempting to adapt it and subsequently giving rise to the most fragmented and quarrelsome iteration of Christendom the world has yet seen.

If God made the world, he invented humans and the way we function. Why the hell should we have to repress so much of ourselves in order to have a relationship with him? Isn’t it just possible that I hate worship music because God wants me to worship him another way? What if worship is way bigger than singing or devotion or prayer or anything even remotely related to liturgy and recitation of Scripture? What if worship is merely living, fully and honestly, as the person God made me to be? Could it be that God’s greatest pleasure and glory comes from our fully realized potential? Is it crazy to think that God sent Jesus for just that purpose: to enable us to live freely and without guilty constraint knowing that we are in God’s favor through the redemptive work of his son?

Sure, I’ve declared myself a non-Christian, but knowing what I’m not isn’t sufficient information for me to declare who I am. And that’s something I’m slowly discovering daily as I detach myself from the structure and order imposed on me by the church model. I’m breaking loose from the chains that have shackled me for so long and starting to taste freedom, perhaps for the first time in my life. If freedom is what Jesus came to give us, then Christians are most definitely doing something wrong. Rather than feeling enslaved to Christ, I felt enslaved to other Christians. Christians should be the people I can relate with the most, who are the most free and the most wildly passionate and creative; instead, Christians are slaves in a prison of their invention. For now, my only guiding principle is that I can’t be anything but who I am, and the only way I can be happy is to figure that out. And the way I can figure that out is by living my life and going where I feel I belong. If there is such a thing as the Holy Spirit, it has either given way to some other driving force or it is pushing me stronger than I’ve ever felt in my life.

Jesus was a fascinating person. I love his untempered criticism and opposition to the establishment. It’s something anyone who has felt out-of-place at some point in his life can understand. His methods are even more refreshing. Are people pushing you around? Give ‘em the other cheek, he declares. Don’t play their game. Just take it. Live in it. Engage it. Spread yourself around in it. Notice he never says “ignore them.” If anything, he’s saying we need to actively give even more of ourselves to those who might seek to harm us. Christians are actively avoiding harm these days, setting up quarantined areas where they can conduct their religious rites without the filthy outside world meddling with their schemes. It sounds more like a sinister plot to take over the world than an honest attempt to share the good news of the gospel with the world. Christians aren’t dressing the wounds of the world anymore; they’re just trying to expand the boundaries of their sterile bubble. Dressing wounds means you have to get blood and guts all over your hands, and you can’t do that while simultaneously trying to keep your hands clean at all times. Our hands are dirty, no matter what. Jesus’ hands are scarred, and they’re clean.

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