Sounds like you grew up alongside me. I realize now, after many YEARS of listening to sermons crammed with scriptural minutia and pointless Biblical stories that always somehow boiled down to either “God loves me” or “I need to repent”, that I was cramped and kept down in a Dark Ages of sorts.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve visited lots of churches and heard lots of sermons. Many of them preach extremes, useless debated dogma, or sermons that are meant to help the church out, not the individual. Many preachers habitually “talk down” to their congregation. Many, many churches across America have no influence in their community whatsoever. (Except an occassional Garage Sale.)

My wife is a Christian, and out of a deep love for her I go to church. We recently found one that preached messages that were more of a “self-help” orientation. Gladly I latched on. There is only a 5-minute “invitation” to be “saved” at the end of each message. No more sermons where THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE MESSAGE!!! I told her lovingly that I NEVER wanted to go to another church where the messages were either an attempt to make me a Biblical scholar or attempt to get me saved. I don’t care about all of that baggage anymore. I want to live life in abundance, and that will not happen as long as Sunday is wasted hearing how you’re going to Hell. (Borrowed from “The Simpsons”.)

I like to think of churches and even whole denominations like… schools.

That is a really good way to look at it! How many of us, as Christians, sat in the pews listening to the same sermons over and over and over again, for YEARS!??! Yes, yes, I know there are at times challenging and convicting messages, but like anything else, those sermons tend to be remembered while the seemingly endless number of repetetive and recycled stuff is just outright forgotten.

I still attend Catholic mass on occassion, and I do focus on the liturgy and ceremony. But the homilies given by the priest are, without exception, the most unchallenging, insipid, tepid and barely warmed over lefterovers of sermons that I have ever heard. How devoted Catholics can listen to different versions of ‘you must be a true Christian not just in deed but in spirit’ over and over and over and over again, for their entire *lives* is beyond me!

Eve, you are right. It is like growing up in a little elementary school chair and asked to repeat your abc’s even when you should have moved on to calculus by now! No wonder I felt so cramped, so uncomfortable, so unfulfilled at my old Baptist church. People are looking for more than week after week after week of the Purpose Driven Life.

To

Whazzup?
Did you both miss Jesus’ Sermon on Graphics, Choir Robes, Remodeling & Organized group think? Where is your vision anyway?!

(“actually looking for truth regardless of what other people around me thought.” What is this world coming to.)

I don’t think that tiny little desk you had in kindergarten would fit your big… brain now, eh? ;o) I know my big… brain doesn’t fit in a tiny little desk any more. Not fitting in the desk any more doesn’t make me hate the dear children, much less their teachers. Thank God they have a place to be happy.

As for me, I take myself down the road and I stubbornly keep looking for people with bigger desks. And brains. I wish you luck on your journey, and I wish you good metaphors to ease the frustration, because God knows that it is pretty darn frustrating to have people make church work be about GRAPHICS or choir robes (don’t get me started) or REMODELING instead of feeding the poor, caring for the orphan and widow and… well, you know. Hugs atcha, Eve from eve3.wordpress.com