I have been in a traditional church setting for most of my life. I believed all that I was told growing up. When I became an adult I started having lots of questions. Questions like, if God is love then how does he get any joy from seeing parts of his creation burn in Hell forever? Or why is the decision to go to Heaven or Hell left on me when Jesus said that if He was lifted up He would draw all men unto Himself? I could go on and on with the questions but I think you get the idea. Perhaps some of you reading can identify with this scenario yourself. I had so many questions and those who I thought would have the answers; those who had been in the faith much longer than me and knew the Bible much better than I did failed to satisfy my curiosity. The usual answer for these and other difficult questions was usually one of two answers. First, I was told to pray about and God would answer me. This left me thinking that if that's the case then what did I need a pastor for? The second answer was even more confusing. I was told that some things we weren't meant to know and that we just had to believe it by faith. So I was supposed to study and believe a sacred text thousands of years old that no one had answers to. This was the beginning of my issues with organized religion.
How many of us would ever let our children go to school and sit under a teacher who would not give them the information they needed to pass a test, but would rather tell them to pray for the answer and if they didn't get one that they just have to embrace the notion that they were never meant to know the answer in the first place?
Or how about this one.Who among us would take a job, a new job that we had never done before, and during orientation wind up with a question? But when we go to the trainer for clarification we are told that we should just wait for the answer to to come and if it doesn't come we just move through the job the best we can by mimicing what we see others do or wait until we make an error and are then are told that what we did was not right?
But this is how most people do church...or at least in my experience. I had difficult questions that those in leadership would not or could not answer. I was left, along with many other well meaning believers who I fellowshipped with to do my best without the information that I needed.
It was this kind of unbearable ignorance that started my exit from mainstream church. After a while I just stopped asking the questions. They still existed within me, but I already knew there would be no answer for them and this led to a great deal of frustration with church leaders. How can they lead when they couldn't give a simple explanation to what they were teaching me to do? Sadly, when I later became a pastor I fell prey to this same form of ignorance and then I understood. I didn't want to be responsible for giving an answer to someone that I couldn't justify within myself. This gave me understanding as to why some church leaders had answered like they did. But it also made me angry within myself that I had been sucked into the same empty vortex and was doing the same thing to those I was pastoring.
This was the beginning of my ending with the institutional church. But wait....there's more.
Aho Metakuye Ohayesin
Thom
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