My omnibus on sabbatical, daily prayers, and the condition of the Western Church.

I'm at my desk in my study in the church on a Saturday afternoon, and I think I'm all ready for tomorrow, and it's raining outside. Feels like it's been overcast or raining for a few days now, and I imagine if I was a farmer, it would be getting old. Well, truth be told, I'm not a farmer, and it's still getting old. 

We are now a couple of weeks past our five-week sabbatical break. And it's still good to be here. 

We are playing catch up with people's lives and with the work. Thankfully, we're shifting gears into summer when it's quieter around here, so that allows me some space to catch up. 

The daily prayers have picked up again, and they are at thefieldpastor.com.  If you're interested in such things, you can get up to speed over there, including seeing some of the videos that we took on our holidays.  I usually play them at the end of the daily prayers. 

It was really good to be away and to change the view from our front window for a time. It was very good to experience some other worship and church traditions. I learned some things. I experienced God's love and mercy, and the space in my life to just spend time with Him was a great gift.

I had coffee and visits with other pastors, some young and some retired. I caught up with church leaders and church attenders. I met some new individuals who feel a call towards some sort of pastoral ministry, although the context that they are in locally with those callings would not fit within a local church these days.  

I met with people who are fed up with church, who are tired of the same, who somehow feel the wind of the Spirit blowing on them yet to little effect in their local church. I saw people who are longing for relationship over religion. I talked with people who want to be friends of Jesus but don't know how. 

It felt like, because of being away for a while, or maybe even because I've been in this local field of rural ministry for 18 years, I felt like I was able to see Church with fresh eyes.

Honestly, I've been landing a lot on the thinking of church religion versus authenticity in the Spirit. 

Religion is one of those words that has a broad variety of meaning. Certainly, with far more definitions than I'm willing to undertake at this point in my life. However, for the past while I have been landing in the place where religion looks like the things we might do to keep things in order, or to keep things the way they are, or to just keep things.  

Pastors can be the worst offenders of this sort of religion because it helps control and maintain authority. Or maybe a better word is it just helps to manage order. 

So we have some rules that we create to help manage our large groups and our worship, to help us keep things orderly but focused on God. And over time, when we start to depend on those sorts of rules to lead the church, it's like we've given the keys over to religion rather than Jesus, who is the head of the church. And you know as well as I do that that's not a great thing. 

And so I've been reflecting and thinking about the things our local churches do to manage their lives, but we might not consider them religion. 

I am seeing, first of all, within myself these sorts of actions at work. And I don't like that. 

When Jesus is the head of the church and when his spirit rules our hearts, we can't always control what happens, and we can be real control freaks sometimes. 

And rules for order are not evil things,  they're not always religion. When the spirit is guiding the local church, when Jesus is head of the local church, all can be well.  

It's just that after a while, if we don't keep on top of these things, there are other things that kind of take over the direction of a church.  I suppose it could be political things or societal shifts. Where the focus of the local church lies and what its true agenda is. Of course, the hearts of its leaders will speak a lot to where that church ends up going. And sometimes the direction it's going isn't great. Maybe even isn't godly. 

I see a lot of our churches involved in political discussions, in theological debates, and in engaging in the fads of the day. Those sorts of things scare me good, not because they're not worth of a discussion, but because of how absolutely distracting they can become for a church.  

The past two weeks in our daily prayers, we have been working our way through Second Peter, which is Peter's last writing.  It's like listening to a man who knows his time is limited and he has a few important things to say, so he wants them communicated clearly. 

Peter's second letter is almost completely about false teachers. 

They were infiltrating the church back then already, and their priorities were greed and their own baser instincts. How dark they are and how they twist and trick, especially new believers, into following paths of sin. 

This has been causing me to think deeply about our local churches and our pastors and our leadership. I'm starting to land in the spot where I think there are a lot more false teachers among us than we would identify or realize. Or possibly even name. 

A good chunk of my work is spent in trying to redirect followers towards Jesus. Young believers who once upon a time came to faith but began to follow a strong individual who was perhaps more concerned with his own wealth or his own sexual pursuits.  They end up going down paths that lead them only to darkness, rather than moving them closer in direction towards Jesus Christ and his cross. 

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised at Peter's strong language about this all.  But that strong language has been forcing me to sit and think. First of all, about our own ministry here and about what I call people to. But it's also been making me think about the condition of the church, certainly in the West, which is my experience. 

So many of our churches are pursuing things that they think are important but have little to do with being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ and pursuing him alone. And so in the quieter moments between me and God, I ask, "Is this the falling away that is spoken of in Scripture?" 

I am wrestling with the core values of church today in Western civilization. I mean, I have been for a long time, but this is much more challenging to me than it's ever been. When people who believe in Jesus and who have a life full of good fruit, when they are struggling to find a church that will support their faith in Jesus and his leadership in our lives. And when our churches are distracted by new theologies and fads and a faith that is empty of power, well then I wonder. 

And I ask, "Where is the church?" And maybe how is the church? And finally, what is to come of the Church?  

Praying for answers,
Pastor Randy