My Issues With The Church

As I grew older, I began to notice people in church leadership using judgment, fear and condemnation to manipulate or control the behavior of the people attending church. Did you notice that too?

And those same ‘guilty’ people would defend the manipulation and blame themselves for it.  It began to look like a very dysfunctional, and dare I say abusive relationship with the church.

I couldn’t reconcile the fact that God, who is love, would sanction that type of behavior from the church leadership. That couldn’t be GOD!

Then I went to college and I discovered that there were books that were intentionally left out of the ‘Holy Bible’ called “The Lost Books”. This made me question the authorship of the Bible even more. Could man have created and manipulated this ‘work’ just to control the masses? “Why? And to what end?” I wondered.

Then in 1987, it all made sense, so I thought. Jim Bakker, a televangelist, was indicted for fraud and that’s when I put all of the pieces together.

The ‘church’ was all about Greed ($$$). They are manipulating people into giving away all of their money to the church.  All the church wants is my money. There was no real teaching or understanding of the Bible and no true reflection of love, at all. My opinion, at the time, was that the Church was a poor representation of God and the truth in His Word. Have you ever felt that way? I know I’m not the only one.

To this day (aside from a few Sunday School Bible stories), the only ‘message’ I can remember from sitting in all of those church services was from First A.M.E. (aka FAME) in Los Angeles, CA. Pastor Chip Murray gave a sermon titled, ‘Give God your Beeper Number’.  [Don’t laugh at me…yes, I was a 70’s baby and yes, pagers were ‘all the rage’ back in the day. LOL] At the time, that was the only church that I could ever see myself attending more than once.

I even remember going to a church here in Atlanta that closed the doors and refused to allow anyone to leave until they met their financial goal. Can you imagine? That was the last straw for me. I had figured it out and no church was going to ever convince me to give them another dime. PERIOD! I didn’t want to have ANYTHING to do with Church, so-called Christians and their confusing book. I just had to trust that if I were a good person, everything would turn out OK.

It’s a good thing my curiosity didn’t stop there.

So, time went on. I didn’t step foot into a church for about 8 years and I was proud about it.

I made some great decisions and accomplishments. I also made some painful choices, and even endured lots of heartache. And I did it all without God, so I thought.

Have you ever been turned off by the ‘Church’, the hypocrisy, the judgment, condemnation, criticism and the blatant lack of love?

You’re not going to believe what happened next…

(Continue...My Issues with The Church Got Worse...)