Atonement-based Business Models

It’s important to choose the church you go to carefully. I didn’t realize the importance of this as a young Christian adult in a big city in my early twenties. I thought, wrongly and naively, that all churches were kind of a homogenous mixture of self-sacrificial, therapeutic love. These rose-colored glasses were violently removed after four years spent in two separate churches whose leaders required sacrifice through service to the structure and authority of their church while preaching a significantly direct contradiction: that Christ paid in full the necessary sacrifice for the absolution of our sins as Christians. This doctrine of church servitude as an absolution for sin (or to put it another way, church authority superseding the desired Object of their worship) has been subtly conveyed as a necessity by these, and I assume, many other establishments — possibly so subtly that the leadership itself is unaware of what delusions they’re dispensing. The way it’s propagated is that someone dubbed by leadership as a true person of faith will get to the point in their relationship with God that they’ll naturally want to volunteer their (and I quote) “time, talent & treasure” to the church itself. This isn’t necessarily an incorrect or unbiblical stance, but myself and others have experienced that if a person’s actions don’t blatantly exemplify that ideology, and if that person’s actions aren’t witnessed by that church’s leadership, his/her eternal salvation is immediately called into question. So, an ultimatum is created by the organization’s leadership and it’s an ultimatum involving where that person’s soul will spend eternity. For a believer (particularly a new or newly returning believer) these stakes are tremendously and needlessly high. Keep in mind — all of this is based on whether or not enough is being done for a certain church structure, not on Christ’s finished, sacrificial work on the cross. But, ironically (and thankfully), it’s that person of faith’s very salvation that ultimately prevents her/him from performing works in order to be seen by church leadership. Performance based churches are not only antithetical to the Gospel’s truth, but are an active offense to its fundamentals. This post isn’t meant to offend anyone with a genuine relationship with Jesus and is only meant as a trajectory correction for certain institutions that I’d rather not name. And I also hope that this isn’t as necessary a correction as I believe it to be. I do truly believe that we’re all being refined as believers and I also believe that this refining process isn’t always painless or easy. However, I’m not willing to forget how, as a believer, working out my personal faith in Jesus Christ has been dismissed or demonized inside of buildings that profess to encourage a deep, meaningful relationship with Christ. I’ve brought all of these misgivings up to the leadership of each of the churches (a total of two) that I’ve gone to that have adopted what I believe to be missteps as doctrine and the only response that I’ve heard is that I haven’t brought any solutions along with my “laundry list” of problems. While that’s a valid point, I can also say that I don’t know how to fix a car, but I still know when a car won’t work correctly. I’m not a specialist. I can’t repair the broken bones of a body, but I know when something painful and wrong is happening within it. My only encouragement in these unique situations is that a person must be discerning when aligning her/himself with a church body. That is my main encouragement regarding all of this: Use discernment! It’s not a decision to take lightly, although generally our culture has watered down aligning yourself with a church to mean attending an optional novelty on Sundays or holidays. But I believe it to be much more of a weighty decision than that and I know others do, too. So, as Christians, it’s important not to be fooled by flashy superficiality, a worship band trying to be Mumford & Sons or the amount of controversial tweets a pastor can muster, but rather by weighing options and “testing the spirits” of places. Love the Lord and choose an environment that will strengthen your convictions, inspire you, encourage you to repentence and edify your soul because God is deeply in love with you.