Musings on the subject of Church - Part I

I have been thinking a lot about church over the past few years and I have wanted to post about this. Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments as I move through these different posts.

In 2004 I read Velvet Elvis - as perhaps many people did. And like many, I was inspired by what Rob Bell had to say about how to understand and live out the Christian faith.  Rob wrote about a different type of a church, about a different way of seeing the world, and about a different view of God.  I became convinced that the only option for church was now house churches. This was the only way to capture the true essence of community and to provide a chance to care about people.  Programs were out and house churches were in. 

I started reading more books like Rob's book - "This Beautiful Mess", "Irresistable Revolution", "Blue Like Jazz", and others. These books only fed my "anti-establishment" tendencies.   I grew cynical about having to leave my home community to go to a church building and I was sure that we were wasting too much time in programs that didn't do anything.  I felt like all I was doing was putting people through programs that took all my time and were burning me out. 


The problem for me was that the church didn't look anything like the church in Acts 2.  I assumed we were supposed to, that the first record of the church was the perfect, pristine and correct or atleast normative. But after about 100 B.C everything fell apart and we had been on the wrong track ever since.

The type of church I was involved with didn't leave any time to be friends with people who didn't know God. It seems as though it got in the way of the main mission of the church which was getting out and telling people about Jesus, building the kingdom and living life. I grew further and further apart from my friends from high school because i was so busy with church life. 

For me - it seemed as though the church was problematic, we had strayed too far for too long from the original mission and the church I knew now was definitely not what God could have intended.  No more buildings, no more programs, no more instititutions.  I was looking for something new and better. 

So with this attitude in mind I headed for Regent College expecting for them to tell me more of what I already knew. I went to learn biblical languages and textual interpretation so that I could better understand these texts fully believing that if we got right down to the Greek and Hebrew there would be clarity about how we should live, how we should do church and what the Christian world was all about.