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The Church: Community or Corporation?


It is quite a bizarre experiance when you find greater support, care, and understanding from the secular world than the Church. The institution has failed. A mass exodus is taking place. People are not leaving the faith, they are leaving the community. Christians in the Church system have failed to be relevant to their own congregations. Believers are finding better aid in secular institutions. An example is my own experience. I have gone to Church all my life and sat in a pew almost perpetually. I cannot tell you that any person at any Church I have attended really knows me or that I know them. Everything is obscured and no one seeks to get personal. In stark contrast when I attended an Renaissance Faire, strangers knew a great deal about me. I wore my Crusader armor, tunic, and sword . People knew immediately that I was passionate about The Crusades and that I was a Christian. I spent time with a secular friend of mine at The New Stirling Arms booth and he made me feel valued. In fact, people all over the fair treated me with dignity and wanted to take pictures with me. Strangers from Poland and Slavic regions were drawn to pose with me for pictures. I felt like I was part of family and I wore my identity on my shoulder. At Church I am compelled to put my passions and my Crusader identity aside. The mission of the Pastor and his elders becomes predominate. I do not feel like I am apart of a family, nay instead I feel like I am apart of a business.

Did Christ really intend for us to be ruled and marginalized by Church leaders? I think not. The Church if failing because it is no longer a family. It has become a fascade; a factory peddling out one man's pontifications and filling Church coffers. The Church has become a product, instead of a people. Denominations sell different brands of Christianity, rather than modeling Christ to the masses. The result is a disillusioned youth who wants nothing to do with the Church and frankly who can blame them? This generation is already being solicited to by every screen imaginable. They aren't looking for another sell's pitch; they are looking for companionship. 

I believe Christ is grieved. That a monopoly in his name has been created to control his children. The Church is suppose to be a family. We are not suppose to be valued for our function in some corporate company, but instead as a creation of God in a community.  That community has been lost. So now believers go to and for in the world looking for a new community. For myself it is the Renfaire folk. Make not mistake, Christ is my savior and I shall follow him ever. But the Church has failed to be what it was founded to be. It was people, not a place. It was suppose to be a community of Christians who showed the world the love of Christ while caring for one another. This form of community survives only in the elect. 

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