Anonymous asked a question:

Sometimes I get really angry at the Western-Protestant church for our consumerism in Christianity and how we base our worship services on emotional highs and raise our hands to the bridges and hooks of songs, out of emotion, and neglect the God they are being sung to.

Hey dear friend, I get mad about that, too. There’s a lot of strange fakery out there and I think people are catching on.

Here’s one thing I’d gently like to suggest, and as I have no pastoral authority with you and I’m just a stranger online, you may please feel free to dismiss what I’m saying and to disagree. I hope you will hear me with a pure heart of grace and love for you.

I absolutely believe you’re coming from a genuine place of desiring authenticity. The only thing is, I wouldn’t want that to make you run the opposite way against a certain subculture or a group of people, as if “I’m not gonna be like those Christians” is going to help. I can promise you with guaranteed certainty that it will not.

Consumerist Christianity is bad; emotionalism is bad; legalism and fundamentalism is bad; those are true sentiments. But at times these sincere convictions can filter the way we see all of church, so that by slow degrees we begin to think buildings are bad, programs are bad, techniques are bad, schedules are bad, and let’s not do it like those guys with big speakers and jumbotrons, and we’ll show them what it really looks like, and I’m so anti-institutional and counter-cultural, and I’m so over the plastic manufactured Sunday machine, and let’s be organic and “get back to our roots.” This is such a common temptation to every Christian that I’m sure it’s Satan’s favorite game-plan.

An over-desire to be “purist” is still idolatry. It’s exactly how Satan fractures the church so that Christians will bicker and grumble at each other instead of looking past the box and getting into the battlefield.

Continue reading “I Want a Better Church (And the Church Is Me)” →