Church

For the past several months now, I’ve been thinking and reading about ‘Church’. And not in a very good kind of way.

I’ve been a member of a church all my life. My parents were Catholic when I was born, so automatically, I became Catholic. In my teen years, when I started to develop a deeper hunger for spiritual things, I looked around at what I could get and ended up writing to the Jehovah’s Witnesses thanks to their then catchy magazines everywhere. They were prompt to answer and before long I had a mentor who was more than willing to teach me in the ‘Witness’ ways. I even attended their kingdom hall services a few times.

But there was something a bit too rigid and a bit too well guarded about them that unsettled me.

A few years later when I became a born-again Christian, I wanted ‘more’ from church than the systemic mechanisms of what I was used to. So, I temporarily joined a Protestant church. I liked the hymns and the warmer, and more open congregation. I also liked that I could get with my fellow youth and do youth stuff together.

But that too failed to fulfill my inner cravings in the long term.

Another few years later, I landed in an evangelical Christian church, which was, for the most part, an answer to my prayer. I even joined the choir at one point, save the fact that I can’t sing. And from 2003, I’ve been happily a member of the evangelical church, served in ministry, led ministry… until recently.

It all started when I had finally had enough of my pastor’s chauvinistic attitude, well-hidden in eloquently delivered sermons, convenient out-of-context scripture quoting, and googled jokes. It was a build-up of little comments and seemingly harmless jokes every now and then that piled up enough straws to finally break the camel’s back. I scribbled on my notebook that Sunday morning in 2017 that it was going to be last time I ever attended that church under that pastor. And sure enough, for someone who’d religiously attended church for the last bazillion years, I stopped going to church.

I’d previously been very critical of people who don’t attend church, or people who don’t actively participate in church activities. I’d always frowned on people who came in and left immediately after the services as though it was some kind of theatre. What? No chit chats? No making new friends and smiling at strangers? No joining ushering or hospitality ministry? I’d always thought that these individuals were not ‘Christian enough’.

Just a few months after unremorsefully quitting church, I learned that the particular pastor had been transferred and a new pastor would be replacing him. Yeaah! I could now go back to church… Yet, in those few months of absence, I had managed to fall out of love with church.

To be fair, I had already lost my love for the church before this season. It began sometime in 2016 when I joined a five-member bible study group made up of individuals who had a hunger for God’s word. Using the inductive method of studying scripture with specific study guides, and using the Bible as the main/only source of reference, we started to understand God on a whole different level. We were/still are eating the raw, tough meat of the word. Slowly, church sermons started to feel a little diluted and less substantial, and sometimes even irrelevant.

Now, there are two aspects of church. There’s the church that is the body of Christ, and there’s the institutional church. There shouldn’t be a difference but there actually is, and it’s hard to tell. In the days of the apostles after Christ died, resurrected and was glorified, the believers used to meet in homes. Back then, they were known as ‘the people of the way’, later they became known as Christians. Collectively, they were the church – the body of Christ. Even when they dispersed to different countries and started new groups, they were still the church, because church was not a place, but an identity. Becoming a believer, becoming a Christian back then, was a significant, life-altering, no ordinary acknowledgment.

When the number of believers increased significantly, things had to be set in order. Meeting in homes became impossible and the only solution was to find common places/buildings where more people would fit. Systems had to be put in place, departments had to be established to cater for the various people’s and needs. Leaders had to be appointed. Eventually, the Roman Catholic church was born and thrived for centuries as the sole institutional church before Martin Luther and the Protestant movement arose.

But unfortunately, like everything else with good intention, what started on the right foot ended on the wrong foot. Church was no longer just the body of Christ but a rigid institution that forcefully influenced even those who were not believers. People in Christian nations were Christians not by choice, not by transforming faith, but by birth. It was more of a ‘nationality’ than a faith.

Things moved from the spiritual to the physical. The institutional church did not care so much for an individual’s personal relationship with Christ, or even if they believed in Him at all, but that they be in obedience to whatever laws were set by the privileged few, the leaders of the church. Common people did not own bibles, and depended on the church to tell them what it said. Man being man, the truth was at the mercy of him who held it, and could choose to interpret it to manipulate others.

Not too much has changed today, in fact, it’s more complicated with the hundreds of denominations each flying the Christian banner. And it’s difficult to draw the line between the institution and the body (of Christ) because most of the members of the body are also members of the institution, yet a lot of members of the institution are not authentic members of the body. We are afraid of criticizing the church because the institution runs and hides behind the body. Which Christian wants to point a finger at the body of Christ?

So, I’ve been thinking about church in those complicated terms. But I’ve gained clarity the more I’ve thought about it. I’ve been thinking about the institution. The one with a specific building, specific name/identity, a registration certificate, specific meeting days and times, schedules and all that… The one that can disappear into oblivion if all its members revoked their attendance. That church, not the body of Christ.

See, when Apostle Paul admonished the Christians not to forsake the gathering of believers, he did not have the Sunday services in mind. The gathering of believers, which happened mostly in homes, was for the intention of admonishing one another, encouraging, learning, and growing together. It was not just for the sake of gathering as it has become today. Some people actually gauge their faith on how faithfully they attend church, yet some of them do not benefit spiritually from that attendance. It’s just a religious ritual. And it has been a religious ritual for me too, for the most part.