Disorganized Religion

A long time ago (comparatively, time moves very oddly these days…), I (Laine) wrote this post about my experience thus far with the first church I’d ever regularly attended. Coming to Christianity as an adult has been…an experience. Especially as a strong, capable, independent, female (I wish it didn’t matter, but I’m not convinced it doesn’t) adult who is as committed to God as I know how to be.

See, the thing is, I came to Christianity as an adult – I did not come to faith as an adult. My faith is independent of any church, and my relationship with God is the oldest, strongest relationship I have.

Included in that post were some words that seem rather painfully prophetic at this point:

All forms of seeking God and seeking to understand God should be welcome in a church. Not just welcome, actually – encouraged. Celebrated and supported, protected and defended, by the community within. If a church discourages attempts to understand God and share that understanding with the people within the church, they’re doing something very wrong.

Discouraging Attempts to Understand God

Churches are organizations, first and foremost. And the broken churches among them are organizations which fundamentally do not understand their purpose – which is to build, guide, and teach community for the purposes of understanding God, learning about God, and growing closer to God. A very good friend of ours said it best when he said that instead, churches seek to quantify and define God.

The church’s purpose is to build, guide, and teach community for the purposes of growing closer to God.

This quantification looks like building a box that contains the full and complete definition of God. The walls of this box are built based on the church’s understanding of God. “God definitely does X, and God definitely does not do Y.”

It’s great to use a starting point to try to understand God. However, no matter how smart or how large or how clear a church is regarding God, he is by definition a mysterious being – so they cannot possibly have a complete understanding of him.

When churches do this, they get scared. Churches (hopefully) know that God is supposed to handle stuff – not them. So when they quantify God down to what they know, they make him small and only as capable as they are (see flow diagram below).

They say, “if our idea of God is right, he cannot punish us because we are Right ™! Our idea of God is our safety.”

Scared, broken churches end up making the Box of Acceptable Understanding of God (BAUGs, (tm)) into the idols by which they survive – where “idol” means “thing worshiped above/instead of God.” Or…”thing that will keep us totally definitely safe you guys…” This means that scared broken churches worship BAUGs for the purporses of keeping the church safe from God. “If we stay all stay here, if we all live within the walls of this box, God will protect us and we will be safe.”

If inside the box = safe, the converse of that is also true – outside = not safe. People invest in the safety of the Box of Acceptable Understanding of God. Most people know on some level that God cannot be contained in a box, so…they have to decide to trade their actual understanding of him for the Box. This is a horrible feeling. People do horrible things in the name of safety. Included, they begin to believe that things outside of that box put them, their families, their church, and their faith at risk. That’s a lot of risk, so…they also begin to believe that anything that falls outside of the BAUG – beliefs, practices, questions…people…– must be destroyed.

Scared, broken churches end up making the Box of Acceptable Understanding of God (BAUGs, ™) into the idols by which they survive.

One Safe

There…are a lot of problems when this happens. The biggest is that it does not accurately reflect reality – because there is only one safe. And that safe is God. An incomplete understanding of God – and there is no complete understanding of God – is not God. A church who worships anything above God, and especially a church who worships their understanding of God as “safe” and “contained” is wrong about what keeps them safe. It is wrong about God.

A church who worships anything above God, and especially a church who worships their understanding of God as “safe” and “contained” is wrong about what keeps them safe. It is wrong about God.

So…imagine what a church does to anyone who challenges their idol of safety. Imagine what they do in the name of God. Chances are very high that whatever they do, it will do significant damage to those challengers.

Troublers

So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. When he saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?” 

“I have not made trouble for Israel,” Elijah replied. “But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals.

1 Kings 18

When churches build these BAUGs, they do it because they tell themselves that they must keep themselves safe, because God clearly cannot. God, when limited to our own understanding, is too limited to handle most of our problems. We think, in moments of panic, he doesn’t see, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t care, he cannot help us.

On occasion, someone shows up – a troubler – who challenges the boundaries of those boxes of God-understanding. Because… God challenges the boundaries of those boxes. 

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!” Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Troublers bring with them a choice: the church can choose to expand the box around their definition of God, and keep those walls flexible in the future, or…they can attempt to force the person who is pointing out that the box exists to be quiet and stop pointing it out. To quiet these people, these troublers who bring with them an expanded understanding of God, a church broken in this way will either push them out of the church or systematically break them down until they go silent.

It Hurts

…let that sink in for a minute. To make people be quiet because they present a challenging understanding of God, churches push people out of church or systematically break them down until they go silent.

Do you know what gets broken down to make these people go silent? It’s their faith.

People assume that churches speak for God. Ideally, that’s true. But when churches get sick, when churches forget that God – wild, uncontrollable, unpredictable, beautiful God – is the only safe and they instead turn God into their understanding of him, then…those churches by definition only speak for themselves. 

When people have an understanding of God that’s outside of the BAUG, they’re told one of a few things:

1. You’re wrong.
2. You’re crazy.
3. You’re wrong and crazy.

Regardless of which option the church goes with, people are definitely told that any previous relationship they’ve had with God – any relationship that has helped them build the understanding of God that they have – is invalid. In fact, they are told that that previous relationship with God has really been them failing God. How is a person supposed to know how to fight that? They’re also told that the truth they know about God is in conflict with the religion, and the people, that they love. And they’re told that they must choose between those two – and far too many pick the religion, or they refuse to make a choice and they pick neither.

The cost of quantification, of trying to make God’s houses into places that are safe from Him, is the destruction of faith.

The count of friends we have who have given up on God, thrown up their hands and said He isn’t worth it, because of churches, is too God-damned high. The cost of quantification, of trying to make God’s houses into places that are safe from Him, is the destruction of faith. Specifically, the destruction of the faith of people who stubbornly insist that the emperor has no clothes – people who insist that God does not fit, that he cannot fit in the box the church has put him in. The cost of quantification is to make His people hopeless.

Sometimes, the emperor has no clothes. It’s our prerogative as honest people to say, “but he hasn’t got anything on.”

And sometimes, the church refuses to see God.

Fighting the BAUG

“They killed Jesus because he smashinated organized religion. It wasn’t the Romans who put him on trial, the Jews insisted on it because he smashinated what kept them safe.”

us, talking about this

No one gets executed or persecuted for being a bland, nice guy. Jesus wasn’t Mr. Rogers. He was a table-flipping intellectual terrorist:

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

“Woe to you, blind guides! You say, `If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?

Matthew 23:13-17

Organized religion has made it a necessary part of their business, of their survival, to destroy the people who point out that the BAUG exists and is inaccurate. Often churches can’t accurately explain the box which contains God, but they know very clearly when someone is not within it.

Even more amazing, sometimes the box isn’t even consistent from person to person in the church – even among leadership in a church. So…the person who is cast out or broken down ends up abused as collateral damage in a fight the church starts but isn’t actually willing to have – all for saying or being things, too clearly and too loudly, that don’t fit within the BAUG.

This Isn’t Theoretical

The more keenly observant among you have probably picked up on the fact that this isn’t theoretical for us. Would be cool if it was. It hurts, to have people you trust, people who are supposed to represent God, try to break your faith. It hurts to have them and the people around them use their relationships with you to try to reinforce why you should give up your faith. And it hurts, ultimately, to be shoved out of church for choosing God.

There are some things that we’ve learned though. We’ve learned that the choices as a troubler, as a determined voice that tries as hard as it can to point out that God is not a BAUG, are: 1) don’t be clear, 2) don’t be yourself and hide, or 3) be clear, be yourself, and risk being forced to go.

There are also some truths about relationship with God that we’ve become convinced of:

1. You cannot have God and still have control.
2. Your understanding of God cannot be more important to you than God Himself.
3. You cannot tell people to serve God and that they can’t completely know him – and then attack those people for saying he’s doing things in unexpected ways.

God is bigger than any church, and he will take care of you if this happens to you in service to him. And…all of this leads us to the following conclusion: it’s better to have religion, to have community in service to God, be disorganized and based on joy and choice than to do this to people.