As much as I love my church and am enjoying a newfound vision into the unbiblical nature of much of the structure of institutional churches and digging into what is the larger community of organic-church-type people in social media, I am discovering a disturbing trend therein.
The amount of people in organic or "organic" churches that actually follow Jesus seems to be approximately equivalent to the amount of people in institutional churches that actually follow Jesus. That is to say, not very many.
My assessment of the situation so far is that people who leave institutional churches (ICs) do so most of the time for bad reasons. There are many good reasons to leave the IC structure behind, but I have not yet met many who have left it for biblical reasons. Most that I've so far seen leave because they got mad at someone in the IC, their pastor lorded it over them and they just wanted out because they're Americans and free spirits, they felt like their pastor lorded it over them and they just wanted out because they're Americans and free spirits, they don't want to actually meet with a group of Christians on a regular basis to do things churches ought to do, and/or (and this is a biggie) they adhere to heretical beliefs and don't love the Scripture.
So, basically, a lot of the time talking to "organic church" people is like talking to Emergents/postmoderns/liberals who merely stopped displacing their bodies to a certain location every Sunday morning. Except for the outward trappings of religion, they'd be right at home in a PCUSA or Episcopal happy-house.
And a popular mantra among such people is "There are many ways to interpret the Bible." I've heard it so much already. That's why I wrote the previous post.
Church ought to be organic because we desire to be more biblical, not because we want to be less biblical.
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