The Church must change or die!

Before you say God will never allow the Church as we know it today to die think about the 400 years between Malachi to Matthew when God remained silent to give mankind time to think before He began something new with the coming of Jesus Christ. God will accomplish what He wants with or without our help.  God’s ways or not our ways and I do not think God is happy with how our religious leaders have been introducing their own personal agendas and ignoring what God wants.

What happen with the Temple leaders in the Old Testament has been happening with our Church leaders and change must come. 

For thirty years I have not believed God of the Old Testaments was a God who desired to plunder the land and slaughter people. He was then and now a God of love, inclusion, grace, compassion and mercy.

Old Testament religious leaders used their own immaturity and tribal insecurities to define God. They interpreted and translated God’s words and added their own personal agenda and often what God wanted was not what the religious leaders of the time presented to the people. The same is happening today.

I have come to believe God knew that communicating through the ranks of priests and scribes and judges was not working. It led to his words being distorted. The only way God could communicate His character truthfully and without distortion was to bypass the intermediaries and speak directly to the people through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ came and defined God as He really was and is.  Jesus Christ came without a personal agenda.  His only agenda was to accomplish what the Father sent Him to do. But, our religious leaders down through the years took up their swords to do battle with the scientists, thinkers, creative minds, innovators and to a certain extent continue to do so today. They have put on the old masks of the Old Testament Temple leaders and presented us with a violent and intolerant God that wants nothing to do with people THEY disapprove of unless they conform to THEIR values. It is time we get pass those immature views and contemplate what has been revealed to us by God. If we did that we would see that God has been evolving and adapting since the beginning of time. Many of our Church leaders today prefer the wicked God that strikes down the unrighteous and raises up the righteous and refuse to free their minds and keep the old out. God is doing a new thing and they are unable to perceive it.

The Church today is once again portrayed as a place of bigotry, narrow mindedness, leaders in love with power, leaders more interested in buildings and entertainment programs than meeting the real needs of the people, leaders over occupied with sex, eager to support unjust wars and leaders that do not want change.

A revolution will not bring about the change needed.  Only a dedication to change by evolution will accomplish the ongoing change that must happen in the Church. We were told the only way to save a village in Vietnam was to destroy it and now we say the only way to protect ourselves from violence is to wage a war of shock and awe on terror and we expect God to support us in these wars. The majority of us Christians cannot accept that secular Israel is not always right because of what our religious leaders have taught us.  Only evolution changes the spirit of man.

Our Church leaders continue to kill off new ideas and inspirations before they can even take root.  They have learned nothing from Christ parable of the sower. New growth exposed too quickly to the sun and burns up.  I have seen this over and over in the church today. Leaders put too many ritual demands, traditional demands and religious demands on the people; especially new people and they feel the heat and wither away.  

Pope Francis is trying to bring about an evolution in the Church and many religious leaders and lay people (like my housekeeper) are misguided in opposing him.  It takes no courage to sit at the comfortable tables of the priests/cardinals/bishops and no courage to do surveys and censuses then ignore them. But, Pope Francis is standing up bravely speaking of the change that he believes and I believe God wants in the Church. He has chastised the religious leaders for focusing too much on sex, divorce and family planning while neglecting what the people need to survive in the 21st century.

There are people sitting in the back pews who have the courage to imagine that newness (change) within the Church is not only possible it is inevitable. It is growing in the bellies of those that the religious leaders have deemed immoral and have made to feel unwelcome in the Church community. An evolution is coming and religious leaders will not stop it.

Evolution (change) in the Church will take time, but the people are growing impatient because religious leaders have done nothing in the past to address the problems. The people want change and want it now.  They are tired of waiting, but wait they must for real change to take hold. There is no one program that can solve the Churches problems overnight. The people must realize that if we are to see real, long lasting change then we must be willing to give it the time it needs to grow and we must see to it that our religious leaders never stop evolving again.

Religious leaders once again have come to believe we serve them.  God called them to a vocation that requires them to serve us.  We must return power to the people. The Church is no longer connected to culture and society, it is not where God wants it to be, and therefore it is not where God is. Our religious leaders have become custodians of empty historical buildings (museums).  We are left clinging to the past until we are willing to embrace the newness God wants to give us.

I have grown tired of sermons and songs that want us to believe that everything is okay in the Church when it is not.  We the people have allowed our culture and the Church to drift apart. Denial and cover up have permeated our Church. Denial comes when we fear the future. We should be finding truth every Sunday; instead we go for doses of fiction, enough to cloud our perception for the week ahead that everything is okay. The Jeremiahs of today are those that are powerless, who have no vested interest in keeping the present system propped up. I do not believe God is in what we are doing anymore. The denial and cover ups must stop once and for all.

God will not be forced in to some temple, place, church, box, agenda, theological position He does not want to be in. God can leave where He does not want to be. The journey of faith is not stagnant, but an evolution of the Spirit.

What is stopping the changes needed in the Church – who is saying no – who is saying impossible- only those whose interest lies in keeping things as they are now – those with power and interest invested in staying the same. Dare to dream where God may want to be today – among the poor, disenfranchised, the ordinary, the real, the people deemed immoral by the Church leaders and the places where Church leaders never thought were possible. – Yes, even among the Gay, divorce and those using artificial birth control.