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 am describing.

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 discuss in A Biblical Vision for the Church) encourages that. By doing faith in a tightly bonded community, a man or woman grows in Christ and develops an active ministry. But the liturgicalization 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, on the other hand, 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, the music is so loud that 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 the early 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 70 AD. 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?

On the contrary, Acts 2:46 says, “day by day… they were taking their meals together.” Hence, they gathered daily. 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.” In Galatians 4:9-10, he refers to the observance of special days as a “weak and beggarly element of bondage.” He also says in Colossians 2:16-17, “So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come.” Therefore, 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 the 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; Revelation 1:6; Revelation 5:10). 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. In fact, 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 can seem burdensome and intense.

The institutional church, however, allows you to (pretend 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 [literally, “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 lay out the proper model in A Biblical Vision for the Church, 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; 2 Corinthians 11:7-9; 1 Thessalonians 2:9).

On the other hand, elders (both general church leaders and those who taught Scripture) were only compensated with “double honor” (1 Timothy 5:17) and “very high esteem” (1 Thessalonians 5:12-13). 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 teach 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 cover the false doctrines that support institutional church in Major Errors of Modern Christianity).

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 and high esteem 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.