Liberating Christianity From the Church, pt 2

This is the second excerpt from the manuscript of Leland Yialesis.

For more than 1500 years Christians have been taught that the purpose of gathering together as Christians was for the experience of worship, specifically to worship as a group congregational worship. But after 1500 years of a congregational worship-based Christianity we find a Christianity that is listless and dying. It has no dynamic with which to challenge the pervasive secularism of the Western industrialized societies and no strength to challenge and change the non-western world. If Christianity is ever to recapture the dynamism that it had during its early years as recorded in the New Testament, the first thing that must be abandoned is the pursuit of worship as the primary purpose of Christian gatherings. Worship is, and must always remain, a byproduct of the encounter between a person and the Divine. It may be that a person will experience that encounter with the Divine and worship while in the assembly of Christians (note I Cor. 14:23-25), but that is an experience that is incidental to the gathering. As the family gathering at the supper table is not primarily to be a tour de force of haute cuisine, but is there primarily for the purpose of providing necessary nourishment to each of the members that has gathered around the family table. So, the gathering of Christians is for the purpose of providing spiritual nourishment for each of the members that has gathered.

It is exactly this confusion of primary and secondary purposes that has resulted in the insipid Christianity present in the world today. Christians in the New Testament gathered for the express purpose of building one another up in the faith and in the experience of becoming the body of Christ. They saw one another as members of that common body and each of them needed to give and receive to be built up “in the unity of the common faith and common knowledge of the Son of God,” (Eph. 4:13 Phillips) until they arrived at real Christian maturity. They gathered as the community of faith and to be the community of the faithful. Worship is no more the goal of Christian community than patriotism is the goal of a school board meeting, or a townhall meeting. At the end of the school board or townhall meeting one may have a strengthened sense of patriotism because of the experience of the shared responsibility of governance, but the problem of the leaking school roof had better have been solved, or a solution found to the problem of collecting the garbage, or fixing the roads. Otherwise, no matter how strong the patriotic feelings were, the school and the town are in trouble. So, it is with the Christian gathering. Strong spiritual feelings, even the experience of worship, may have been experienced during the gathering, but if each of the members of the body of Christ has not been built up, has not experienced growth in the faith and in the knowledge of Christ, has not had the experience of sharing and of receiving, if there has been no experience of genuine community and the fellowship that community brings, and most importantly of loving and being loved during the process of building one another up in the faith, then Christ has not been honored and the meeting has failed.

Much, if not all, that has gone wrong with Christianity during the last 1500 years can be attributed to the primary emphasis that has been placed on worship as a necessary, ritualized experience for the Christian community. This emphasis on worship, which is primarily an emotional reaction of the individual spiritual experience, has fed and continues to feed the failure of the church to be that dynamic source of Christian strength in the world. The entire emphasis on congregational worship that lies at the very center of the weekly life of the church is built its foundations on the sands of tradition and not on the sound bedrock of New Testament teachings. Nowhere in the New Testament is there even one reference to Christians assembling for the purpose of worshipping, either individually or as a group. Nowhere does Jesus enjoin the experience of worship as a goal of Christian fellowship. Nowhere in Acts or in any of the Epistles, do the Apostles call Christians to gather for the express purpose of worshipping. Congregational worship, as the express purpose for gathering, was not a part of the life of the Christian church in the New Testament. Tradition has overthrown the primary purpose of the Christian community, which is to build up one another and reach out to others through God’s ‘agape’ love. As D. Bonhoeffer says in ‘ The cost of discipleship’, “The real trouble is that the pure word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast – burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations – that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision for Christ.” Christianity is profoundly simple yet we have made it abjectly complicated.

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