If you’re a Bible skeptic or enemy of Christianity, odds are good that your opposition to the faith is not purely intellectual. Rather, you have most likely had the misfortune of dealing with the poor witness of the bulk of what I call “institutional Christianity.” The single biggest challenge for the Christian faith is that the true Church cannot trademark the name “Christian.” We have no power to stop those who violate Jesus’ commands from calling themselves His followers. This was a problem as far back as the first-century Church – indeed, Jesus predicted that many of His followers in the Last Days would be false disciples who would be consigned to damnation when they were judged (Matthew 7:21-23).

Unfortunately, the way Christians “do church” in America is a severe deviation from the way it is described in the Bible, which has had the dual effect of stunting the spiritual growth of true Christians who attend institutional churches while also causing a proliferation of false believers in both true churches and counterfeit churches. The stunting of spiritual growth robs God’s children of the spiritual fulfilment that is their divine right upon being adopted into God’s family, while the proliferation of false believers fuels misunderstanding in the unconverted world about the true nature of the Christian faith.

In this article, I am going to explain why, as with communism, the institutional church’s deficits are inherent and inevitable, not simply a failure of adherents to “do it correctly.” If you have been harmed by false or immature Christians, you will most likely recognize at least some of what I will describe.

What Is Liturgical Institutionalism?

I call the way most Christians today do church “liturgical institutionalism.” The word “liturgical” captures the centrality of the Sunday service that is formally structured, while the word “institutionalism” captures the bureaucratic nature of a formal church organization that controls a flow of money and power. 

Each of these elements is dangerous and anti-biblical. For example, the problem with liturgy is that it’s a checkbox activity. You sit through church on Sunday and feel you’ve done your duty to God. Maybe you attend a Bible study or small group on top of that, but even still, the role you play is very passive. Pastors may talk a good game about the life you are supposed to live as a Christian, but if they don’t hold you accountable to anything beyond attendance at Sunday services and church events, you may end up either in Hell or the furthest chair from Jesus in heaven, because you made little effort to truly learn the Bible, put sin to death, live a holy life, and teach others the Gospel.

True Christianity is being completely sold out to Christ in every area of life, and the family model of worship (which I will discuss in a later article) encourages that. By doing faith in a tightly bonded community, a man or woman grows in Christ and develops an active ministry. But the institutionalization of Christian worship leads to isolation, spiritual shallowness, and burnout. This is not because liturgy is being done incorrectly, but because it is missing from the Bible altogether.

The problem with institutionalism is that it brings money and power into a system that was not designed to run on either. When this happens, the purpose of the church inevitably becomes not the spread of the gospel, but the survival of the institution that pays the salary of the pastoral staff. Diversion of money and energy into the care and feeding of the church machine takes resources away from evangelism. Pastors become afraid to teach or preach anything that could threaten church attendance and giving. And, of course, sometimes unsavory characters are drawn to the institutional pulpit for self-promotion or to abuse the power they find there.

Let’s explore each of the two prongs of liturgical institutionalism in turn.

Why Liturgy Is Wrong

The Bible says nothing about:

• Church buildings, other than homes or convenient locations where Christians are able to gather
• Formal church services
• Sermons
• Formal garments for either clergy or laity
• Worship bands
• Smoke machines
• Various other trappings of the Sunday service

All that’s talked about in the passages relating to organized church is Christians gathering together as a family to praise God together, support one another in their struggles, and help deepen each other’s faith. Elders/pastors/teachers/bishops were mature Christians who helped less mature Christians learn how to live the Christian faith. Deacons managed the giving of money to the needy. That’s all there was to it.

Unfortunately, the primary focus of most Christian churches nowadays is liturgy, which isn’t even discussed in the New Testament, instead of Christian living, which is what most of the New Testament covers. If Christian living were being taught in faithful churches, such churches wouldn’t be full of adulterers, gossips, murderers (in the heart, at least), and porn addicts, including pastors. Focusing so heavily on church service is like tithing mint and dill and neglecting the weightier matters of the Law (Matthew 23:23). Applying some structure to how we worship God when we meet is fine, but its importance pales in comparison to a proper focus on the heavier matters of God’s Law, which is how to live out the Bible.

Unfortunately, even most faithful churches teach the Bible the way institutional schools teach languages. If you ever studied a language in school, most likely you spent 2-4 years taking the language, but even after all that you only retained a few simple phrases. You studied all about the language for years, but you still can’t have even a basic conversation with a native speaker.

The point of learning a language should be to learn how to speak the language, not to learn about it. At first, the two approaches look the same. You have to learn the basics of a language before you can speak it, after all. “Learning about,” however, forever stays shallow, while “learning to” involves deep application. Evangelists and pastors should therefore be those who “know how to” most, not those who “know about” most.

What should be taught in churches is wisdom, which is learning how to take the Bible and apply it to the real situations we encounter in our lives. We should not be merely nodding along as we are lectured on super complex and specific interpretations of Scripture, or as we are given biblically shallow pep talks. As James 1:22 indicates, we should learn to be doers of the Word, and not hearers only. But hearing is the focus of liturgical worship services.

In fact, there are four key reasons liturgical services are problematic:

• They encourage passivity. You show up to church, you get your coffee and donut, you listen to music performed by other people (you may sing along, but in many churches, no one can even hear you), and you listen to a sermon that was researched, prepared, and delivered by a professional speaker. Church is something that happens to you, not through you.
• They encourage consumerism. Because the experience is passive, your enjoyment of it is the primary consideration. You want good music, exciting preaching (which is hard to source in a local church, since you can almost always find better preachers on YouTube), a cozy chair, people you feel comfortable around, etc. If you don’t get these things, you leave because you’re “not being fed” and go to a church more calibrated to your preferences. The fundamental experience is selfish.
• They encourage stagnation. Because the experience is consumeristic, it leads to a lack of growth. Even if you have a more mature sense of “I want to grow through this,” you can only grow so much by being spiritually spoon fed. Growth comes through service to others, not sitting through a Sunday service. Congregants therefore often get stuck in early or middle stages of spiritual growth.
  Now, you may argue that you can still grow at a church through small groups or volunteering in ministry or doing missions trips. However, the core of a church is almost always the Sunday service, and growth is very difficult to achieve through such a service except for the most beginner of believers, who just need to hear the Word preached to them. The Sunday service is thus a massive albatross around the neck of the overall sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
• They stifle church growth. For all of the above reasons, churches have a hard time reaching the lost. Sermons are usually boring, churches grow primarily via transfer growth (which looks good on paper but isn’t a real achievement), and those who have experienced church hurt or have skewed perceptions of Christianity find nothing to recommend the faith to them from a Sunday morning experience. Streaming services offer better entertainment than most churches, so why would the average American “consume” church, when Netflix on a big-screen TV with a pizza or ice cream is more enjoyable?

These reasons are why there is no mention of formal liturgy or structured worship anywhere in the New Testament. As far as the sacraments go, baptism was something done immediately upon conversion (for example, see Acts 8:36-39 and Acts 16:27-34), not on scheduled dates, after taking a catechism class, or as some kind of formal ceremony. Communion was also a family meal, eaten every time Christians gathered, not a religious ritual involving a tiny pellet of bread and a thimbleful of juice taken only once a month. The Lord’s Supper was originally enough of a meal to function as a meal replacement, which is why Paul told the Corinthians to eat at home if they were hungry, rather than to come together and eat the bread and wine in a dysfunctional manner (1 Corinthians 11:33-34).

The Sunday Sabbath

The Sabbath, or holy seventh day (Genesis 2:3), was very significant in the Old Covenant. There were many ordinances in the Mosaic Law meant to enshrine it and set it apart. Yet in the New Testament, no command around either the seventh day or the first day of the week is ever given to Gentiles or to Jews beyond the end of the Law in AD 70. The entire concept of the Lord’s Day being the first day of the week in the New Covenant and thus a special day for worship was invented out of whole cloth by later Christians. It has no biblical basis.

As far as I can tell, there are only two verses that even vaguely support the idea. The first is Revelation 1:10: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” This verse supports the concept of there being a Lord’s Day, but given that it isn’t defined, it’s probably just a reference to the seventh-day Sabbath of Genesis 2:3.

The second is a bit more compelling and is found in Acts 20:7: “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul began talking to them, intending to leave the next day, and he prolonged his message until midnight.” To modern Christians, this sounds like proof of church service being on Sunday. However, nowhere in the New Testament is it ever indicated that Christians only gathered one day a week. They were God’s family and were experiencing spiritual gifts and miracles and God’s grace through one another. Many had probably been disowned or at least become estranged from their biological families. Is it even conceivable that they only spent one day a week together?

It’s much more reasonable to assume they gathered frequently, probably daily (Acts 2:46 says “day by day… they were taking their meals together”). Therefore, all Acts 20:7 is saying when read in context is, “It happened to be the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread like we did every day, that Paul began talking to them…”

Thus, Sunday is not a special day of communal worship. In fact, Paul says in Romans 14:5, “One person values one day over another, another values every day the same. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind.” The fact that Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday does not automatically make the day sacred for all Christians. As Paul directs, worship an extra amount on Sunday, or Saturday, or Tuesday if you want. But no day is inherently sacred, because universally holy days aren’t a thing anymore.

Sabbath observance is thus an optional discipline, which if observed, should be for rest and rejuvenation, not burdensome religious rituals and practices (Mark 2:27). This freedom of conscience also extends to religious holidays and the liturgical calendar, which are likewise not mentioned at all in the New Testament and represent a reversion to the Old Covenant festival system.

Why Institutionalism Is Wrong

Protestantism is an offshoot of Roman Catholicism, which became very clear to me when I attended a Catholic funeral and saw how all Protestant services I had ever attended were just stripped down versions of the same basic concept. A key doctrine of Roman Catholicism is that the priest is a specially ordained person who is uniquely authorized to perform religious rituals. The laity are not permitted to conduct these rituals at all. The Roman Catholic bureaucracy claims this right as a result of apostolic succession, handed down through the years from the supposed first pope, St. Peter.

Protestantism, by contrast, technically preaches the “priesthood of all believers,” but it does not practice this. Instead of priests, Protestant churches have pastors. These pastors are still ordained, and they conduct the “sacraments” or “ministrations” of communion, baptism, Word, prayer, and worship music.

However, pastoral ordination is not a biblical concept, as “ordination” is a word used only for Jesus in the New Testament. By contrast, all Christians are priests, offering up spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5). We can all apply the sacrifice of Jesus to our own sins through repentance or to the sins of others through intercessory prayer. While certain highly mature and righteous elders can teach the Bible with more seriousness (James 3:1), we can all bring our insights to other Christians (1 Corinthians 14:26), and we can all sing or play songs of worship (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16). We can also all mediate conflicts between Christians (1 Corinthians 6:1-11).

Most Protestant Christians technically acknowledge this, but let me ask you this: are you qualified as a Christian to baptize someone? To administer communion in your own home to other Christians? To preach a sermon? Or do you have to attend seminary and be ordained by a denomination to “officially” minister in the Word and sacraments?

If you and a group of non-pastors break bread and drink wine, baptize a new believer in a bathtub, share your thoughts on a book of the Bible, pray for each other, and sing a worship song while playing the piano, is this as legitimate as a church service? Doesn’t feel so, does it?

The institutional church model thus not only over-elevates the priestly pastor, it also lowers the position of the churchgoing laity. Not only are the laity capable of performing all the functions of an ordained pastor, all Christians must wage war against their sin, fulfill their godly responsibilities, and witness to non-Christians. We are not absolved of these responsibilities because we sit through a church service (liturgical ceremony) once a week. Sitting in church may be the least interesting thing to God that you do all week.

The ugly hidden reality is that the true purpose of a Protestant pastor, like a Catholic priest, is to transfer this responsibility of Christian living to a third party. The pastor studies the Bible so you don’t have to. He lives a holy life so you don’t have to. He witnesses to non-believers so you don’t have to. The worship pastor learns how to play worship songs so you don’t have to.

The church service is thus the ritual whereby you “commune” with the pastor and share in his holy living. This is why there is so much criticism of a pastor when he preaches something controversial to his congregation or cheats on his wife – his failure to be orthodox or holy compromises your relationship with Christ. If the pastor were just another Christian, there would be no special expectation of perfect knowledge or perfect living – compassion and decency would apply just as much to him as anyone else (even with the strict qualifications given for elders in the Bible, they’re still sinners in need of grace – 1 John 1:8-10).

This explains why the church service feels “special”: an informal gathering puts the onus of Christian living on every participant. Everyone must understand the Bible, teach their kids about the faith, follow Christ’s commands, and witness to non-believers. It is burdensome and intense.

The institutional church, however, allows you to transfer this burden to a pastor in exchange for money. The church staff get to make a living off the congregants in exchange for handling their religious responsibilities. Congregants also “serve” in ways that enable the various functions of the church, all of which reinforce its institutional nature.

The institutional liturgical church is thus a subscription service of sorts for Christians, one not described in the Bible at all. This is why so many people raised as Christians deconstruct their faith: not only are people who claim to hold Scripture in the highest regard centering their faith around a non-Scriptural ritual and institutional apparatus, but traditional church discourages righteous living. After all, when 90% of the time, money, and energy of an institutional church goes towards an activity that is purely passive for the majority of its participants, not much is left for actually fulfilling the commandments of Christ. Plus, the act of going to church creates the feeling that one has “done his duty” as a Christian, when in fact nothing of any real significance has been accomplished.

By bringing money into the equation, liturgical institutionalism also twists the concept of church into a money-making scheme for the pastoral staff. It turns what should be a human relationship into a commercial service. This is dehumanizing, as it is consistent with the way corporations and governments farm people for money. Particularly wicked churches are living Peter’s warning about those who “by covetousness exploit [make merchandise of] you with deceptive words” (2 Peter 2:3). Throw in a healthy dose of guilt for missing Sunday service or for failing to give “faithfully,” and you have all the makings of a grand scam.

In reality, the entire institutional church bureaucracy is wholly counterfeit. There is one mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5), and all Christians can access God through Christ directly. None of us need a priest or pastor to go between us and Jesus. We are also all given unique perspectives on Scripture, such that no one ordained pastor has the “right” beliefs and wisdom that a congregation should uncritically accept or consider more important than that of any other Christian who has the Holy Spirit dwelling within him. Even the insights of teaching elders in a proper model of church living can and should be examined against Scripture to ensure they are accurate (Acts 17:11).

This raises the critical question: is participating in an institutional church sinful for a true Christian? Well, for many Christians, it may not be willful sin, but it is still spiritually destructive. To understand this, consider a man who is trying to live healthy. However, he regularly eats canned soup that is full of sugar but doesn’t realize it because the front of the can doesn’t mention sugar at all. This aspect of his diet is not a willful attempt to eat unhealthy, but that doesn’t stop it from being destructive to his health.

Likewise, in institutional churches there are of course many faithful religious leaders who seek to lead well and believers who seek to follow well, but they all unintentionally promote a system that keeps the leaders addicted to illicit gain, while the followers remain spiritually undeveloped, and few people outside the faith come to know Jesus through them. There is no realistic way to fulfill the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20 if the majority of a church’s time, money, and energy is spent on a structured worship service that does not bring in new believers (“make disciples of all the nations”) or spiritually develop any but the most beginner of existing believers (“teaching them to observe all the things I have commanded you”).

Breaking Down the Modern Pastorate

The modern pastor is a confusion of various roles: apostle (even though there are no longer true apostles – 1 Corinthians 15:8), elder/pastor/bishop/teacher, evangelist, and a false notion of a “more priestly” priest between Christians and Jesus. We should abolish this role and restore the original model of assembly and church leadership described in the New Testament. While I while lay out the proper model in a later article, let’s look now at several serious problems with the modern concept of the pastor.

Pastors and Money

If we look at what the New Testament says about church leadership, we see nothing about paid pastoral staff. 1 Corinthians 9:14 allows for a church to fund the living expenses of those who “preach the gospel,” but that language is connected to the role of evangelist, a separate role from that of pastor (Ephesians 4:11). Evangelists were closer to what missionaries are today. Evangelists traveled from city to city, planting new churches and strengthening existing churches. They could be financially supported by their congregations because they were itinerant and would therefore have a harder time providing for themselves, because they couldn’t easily establish themselves professionally in any one location. It’s worth noting, however, that when there was any question of the evangelist’s integrity in accepting financial support, he could choose to forgo such provision (1 Corinthians 9:15-18).

Elders (both general church leaders and those who taught Scripture), on the other hand, were only compensated with double honor (1 Timothy 5:17). They were expected to fund their own living. The reason God set it up like that is so that elders and teachers would neither become spiritually lazy from living off their flock, when they could provide for themselves through day jobs, nor become afraid to preach unpopular Bible truths, lest they compromise their living.

Indeed, these days we allow church leaders to begin their adult lives saddled with significant personal debt from their schooling, fail to require them to develop any marketable professional skill beyond pastoring, and put them in charge of church buildings with large mortgages. Is it any wonder so many are reluctant to proclaim difficult truths that might threaten tithing?

Pastors and Youth

Another particularly problematic aspect of the modern pastor is his youth. Evangelists could be young (1 Timothy 4:12), but responsibility for managing established groups of Christians was reserved for highly experienced and mature Christians, who could only gain such maturity through life experience (they’re called “elders” for a reason – see 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9 for qualifications).

Nowadays, we force a man who’s barely an adult through an intense course of theological study, then put him in charge of a flock before he’s had any significant life experience. It’s no wonder there are so many church scandals and “pastoral failures.” You can’t learn to truly model the gospel until you’ve faced and overcome hardships in life, which generally requires living through long, difficult seasons and shouldering the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood for many years. You also can’t separate elders who have a genuine heart for God from greedy and prideful impostors until they’ve endured great hardship and chosen whether to cling to Christ or cast Him behind their backs at such times.

This focus on doctrinal belief over practical wisdom is central to institutional church and its failure to spread the Word effectively. Proper pastoring is providing believers with relevant Scriptures to tackle the challenges they are facing and helping them connect with God. It is not forcing them to adopt the clergy’s systemized breakdown of the Bible. Planting and nourishing the Word in believers leads to real heart change and joyful obedience. Force-feeding theology leads to lives unmarked by repentance.

A pastor can know every fact about the Bible and still not “get” it. Just because someone knows the Bible or theology extremely well doesn’t mean they’re faithful. For example, the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day were Bible experts and able to exposit Scripture mostly well, but Jesus called them out for their hypocritical behavior (see Matthew 23).

Setting up young pastors with lots of head knowledge but little practical experience also incentivizes a focus on communication skills over godly wisdom and maturity. Furthermore, because their strength is knowing the “correct” doctrine, pastors are incentivized to train their flock to become intellectually dependent on them, rather than able to critically engage with or challenge their ideas.

This has led to an alarming anti-intellectualism within the modern American church. The average churchgoer is trained to trust his pastor, not understand the Bible thoroughly and critically engage with what he is being taught. Almost everything the average Christian believes is purely a matter of blind faith, because he is never taught how to derive his beliefs from the Bible. The fact that much of what the Bible says about church calls the institutional church into question is another reason why churchgoers are taught to be intellectually dependent on their preachers (I will cover the false doctrines that support institutional church shortly).

Pastors and Authority

In the first-century church, there was never a situation where a single pastor ruled a church. Evangelists could occasionally work alone in planting or watering a church, but the goal was always to establish a healthy church with a plurality of elders. Hence why the modern priest/pastor is a confusion of multiple roles.

In proper Christian fundamentalism, there are legitimate authority figures, such as fathers, church elders, and civil governors. However, each of these are positions of responsibility for protecting, raising, guiding, and/or teaching those under their authority. Unfortunately, with the inclusion of salaries for pastors and the centralization of authority under a single figurehead in a church, many Christian leaders thirst for power, rather than yearn for responsibility.

Add on the dual threats of a heavy focus on doctrinal correctness over wisdom and the inevitable elevation of communication skills above all else, and we see the rise of the celebrity pastor, whose eloquence and clear articulation of correct doctrine turns him into a hero. This occurs despite the very concept of a celebrity pastor being a contradiction, since the job of a pastor is to point people not to himself, but to Jesus (see Acts 14:8-18 and 1 Corinthians 3:5-7).

Inevitably, many such celebrity pastors end up like Ravi Zacharias, who was eloquent in his defense of the faith but was sexually assaulting vulnerable women for years. The fact that he named his international ministry after himself might have been a clue to his true nature.

Another classic example is Bill Gothard, the destructive teacher followed by the Duggar family. While claiming the mantle of Christian fundamentalism and even teaching some good ideas that align with the Bible, Gothard also adopted skewed and unbiblical notions of authority (such as wives being expected to obey their husbands, which is not what Scripture says). Unsurprisingly, he and some of his followers molested women, including minors, which is what you would expect from Christian leaders who teach subservience instead of submission.

The proper model of church authority involves leaders who are chosen for their spiritual maturity and are trying help along those who are less spiritually mature, with only double honor for compensation. Without the temptation to profit from or abuse their flock, leaders are far more likely to lead with humility and reverence for Christ.

Twisted Doctrines That Support Institutional Christianity

Salvation by Doctrine

True Christians are called by God to change their intellectual filters to accommodate the Bible, not the other way around. Because each Protestant faction and denomination is founded on a set of specific theological beliefs and institutional structures, most Protestants are lackadaisical about reading and understanding the Bible, and they don’t tolerate intellectual debate outside of predefined boundaries.

Institutional churches benefit from this narrow-mindedness because it prevents the breaking down of walls between different church bureaucracies, thereby minimizing competition for the tithers and church attenders within their domain. It also allows churches to label as heretics those who question the biblical foundations of the institutional church, protecting the church’s dogma from intellectual challenges.

If you are in such a church, have you ever considered how bizarre it is for a church to list out all the things it believes and then require everyone who becomes a member to agree with all of them? Are these churches absolutely certain that there are no heaven-bound Christians who disagree with some of these beliefs? And if such is the case, by what right does a church excommunicate such believers from fellowship?

In the first-century Church, everyone who proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Savior within a city belonged to one church, to the point where the Church struggled with dissension from false believers in their ranks. Still, the apostles considered it better to deal internally with false beliefs than to dare excommunicate a single believer.

Today, however, most Christians fellowship only with the Christians who think the most like them, not every member of the body of Christ, which grieves the Holy Spirit. As Paul warned the Corinthians, we should not have divisions within the Church (1 Corinthians 1:10).

Refer to the following verses for proof that we are saved through belief in Jesus, not our specific doctrinal beliefs:

• He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. (Mark 16:16)
• I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. (John 10:9)
• And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. (Acts 2:21; Romans 10:13)
• Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38)
• Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household. (Acts 16:31)
• If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9-10)

Justification by Faith Alone and “Once Saved Always Saved”

As I explained in How the Gospel Works and Tackling the Hard Questions Head-On, the doctrines of “justification by faith alone” and “once saved always saved” are not biblical. So why are they so popular amongst institutional churches?

Simple: they promote “easy-believism,” whereby nothing more is required of a person to be saved and go to heaven than to say a saving prayer. From that point forward, a person can behave however they want and still remain in the faith, regardless of fruit produced or sanctification pursued. As long as they continue to commune with the ordained pastor through the liturgical ceremonies of their institutional church, they need do no more to maintain their salvation.

In truth, intellectual belief in God alone is not enough for salvation. As James pointed out, even the demons believe… and tremble (James 2:19). Your belief must be made alive through obedience to God’s commandments (James 2:26). This responsibility cannot be outsourced to a pastor or any other third party.

A connected issue is the idea of “passion” in faith. Often Christians will have powerful experiences of God upon their first conversion, and then they will experience it again at big concerts, conferences, and revivals. This gives them a sense that they should be on fire all the time, and they don’t understand why God seems absent most of the time in their lives.

In reality, the faith is not always super exciting. The Christian walk is a marathon, not a sprint, and it can feel like a grind or slog sometimes. However, if you are focused on sanctification, keeping God’s commandments, and fulfilling the responsibilities God has given you, you will eventually find a stable peace and harmony in your life. In this way, it is similar to how the lovey-dovey passion largely settles down in a marriage after a few years, but a stable contentment can eventually flourish once the married couple have navigated through their main conflicts and choose to remain committed to one another.

Rejecting Predestination

An alternate scheme found in institutional churches is to proclaim that humans are not predestined to salvation but rather can choose it for themselves without reference to God’s will. Beyond the rather obvious denigration of God’s omnipotence that this represents, it also presents the problem that if you can choose to be saved, you can also choose as easily not to be.

In this model, every sin you commit could be the one that severs you from your connection to Christ. Thus, preachers must admonish and warn you every Sunday about the dangers of sinning, lest you lose your salvation at a moment’s notice. Congregants live in fear, dominated by pastors who intimidate them with fire and brimstone preaching.

Although in Tackling the Hard Questions Head-On I explained that it is possible to walk away from the faith, this can only happen due to a concerted and persistent rejection of God and a complete disinterest in being one of His children. It is an extreme and unusual case, the product of deliberately feeding one’s heart with sin.

The average Christian will always occasionally sin, no matter how mature or sanctified, and that sin does not remove their assurance of salvation. As with David’s sin with Bathsheba, it merely drives a wedge between God and the Christian that must be bridged, and it may result in consequences that will have to be dealt with at some point. Still, all the Christian has to do to be restored into fellowship with God is to confess his sin, and once he does, God is faithful and just to forgive his sins and cleanse him from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).

The fear of Hell should therefore never be used as a cudgel against God’s children, but authoritarian Christian leaders nonetheless do so to keep their congregants in bondage. Tragically, many such congregants then treat their children in a similarly domineering and fear-based manner as well, terrified that their kids will likewise step out of bounds and lose their salvation. If members of these churches truly understood their liberty in Christ, they would not put up with or participate in such abuse.

Futurism

Note: I’m going to refer here to the idea that the Second Coming is in the future as “futurism” and the idea that the Second Coming is in the past as “preterism.” My own version of preterism, found here, still sees Revelation 20 as in the future.

Standard futurism puts Jesus’ return in the future, which means that futurists believe we are still living in the same state of “already but not yet” that existed during the Last Days of 30 AD – 70 AD. Indeed, futurists explicitly believe we are still living in the Last Days.

The problem with this notion is that it means certain aspects of the Old Covenant Law continue to apply. While they won’t admit it straightforwardly (because it is so clearly against the text of the New Testament), they seek an equivalency between the priestly sacrificial system of the Old Covenant and the institutional church. In other words, they seek by analogy to justify the notion that a pastor is essentially a priest, closer in holiness via ordination to Jesus than the common priestliness of the laity.

As John 4:21-24 make clear, however, the idea of a structured worship system, an intermediary priesthood, and a physical sanctuary were all made obsolete by Christ’s sacrifice (and were dramatically wiped away during the First Jewish-Roman War). His disciples are to worship God in spirit and in truth, and wherever two or three disciples gather in Christ’s name, we have the presence of our Messiah (Matthew 18:20). Nothing more is required for worship.

Beyond trying to resurrect the destroyed trappings of institutional worship, futurists waste an inordinate amount of time, energy, and opportunity to witness by dwelling endlessly on the timing of a supposed future Second Coming. We have our marching orders with the Great Commission, and nothing in our future makes Christ’s command to disciple and teach obedience to the nations any less binding or relevant for our lives.