LET…. MY…. PEOPLE…. GO !!

Chapter thirty-four

Wayne Jacobsen: “I was an associate pastor at a growing congregation in Central California. I learned a lot there, but grew disillusioned by the way the priorities of an institution overwhelmed the simple, relational life of Jesus. In 1980 we left to help plant a new fellowship in Visalia.

This fellowship was designed to be an intimacy-based fellowship with Jesus at the center, and ministry committed to personal relationships instead of programs.”

Finding Church, Wayne Jacobsen

Chapter 2: I know what they mean, but the language still jars me: “They left the church.” Or, “I left the church ten years ago.” Since they have continued to passionately follow Jesus, I want to correct them. You may have left your congregation, but how did you leave the church? Do you think you can belong to him and not be a part of his family? It’s one of the tragic consequences of using the term to describe the myriad of religious institutions that dot our landscape instead of the tapestry of his people Jesus is weaving together.

Chapter 2: They may do many of the things we’d expect a church to do–teach the Gospel, encourage fellowship, and reach out to the lost–but they begin by staking out their beliefs by forcing a meeting structure, decision-making process, and their mission. They try to make people good Christians by getting them to conform to those plans and expectations with varying degrees of pressure and varying degrees of success. The fact that we have hundreds of thousands of such groups all claiming to be the church and that they have so little in common renders the term meaningless.

Chapter 2: It would be easier to say that all religious institutions are bad, and smaller, more informal groups are good, except that it isn’t true. If we just had an organization that represented the one, true church led by the right people then we would know who is in and who is out, except that every group who has ever tried it has ended up arrogant and abusive in trying to keep it pure.

Chapter 2: So we are going to have to make a distinction in our minds between the church that humanity has attempted to build for two thousand years, and the community of the new creation that Jesus is building. They are not the same, though they can gloriously overlap on occasion.

Quoted by permission of Lifestream (lifestream.org). Finding Church: www.findingchurch.com