E09“The Exodus From the Church - What Happened?”

In the Episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, Chris discusses when COVID closed doors it also revealed how many churches and leaders weren’t prepared to shepherd in crisis. Chris revisits the “Sister Christian” deathbed lesson to show how church became a comforting destination instead of fulfilling its purpose. He examines why parishioners and pastors walked away, how denominational branding can obscure true spiritual growth, and offers a candid call to accountability, and self reflection. 

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Episode 9 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Welcome. I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce. When the pandemic in 2020 hit, it ushered in the great exodus from the church. Terms like deconstruction of faith or deconstruction of Christianity became common terms and discussions. And it was more than just discussions online. It became actual act as people started in masses to leave the churches and the churches began to shut down. What happened? I mean, people were struggling in the dark to find their way, and they realized at the time they needed the church, it wasn't there. The voices that should have rose up in the dark and brought hope were silent because the pastors themselves were leaving. What happened? And I'm not saying that all churches, but a great deal of them. Now, before I get into this, I want to recap on last week when I talked about the deathbed confession of Sister Christian. And it's just briefly, we talked about a woman who spent her whole life in church going every time the doors was opened, faithful to that religion, and she had seen it as the destination, when in fact it's just the table of encouragement, like in a marathon race. These tables that have hydration there for you, and as you run by, they give you water and cheer you on and tell you to keep going, keep going, that that's actually what a church is for. It's just encouragement. That's all it is. But we've been told and kind of taught in her culture that it's the destination. So Sister Christian, on her starting line, would start her race, but run right to the table of encouragement, get the hydration, get the encouragement, and run right back to her starting line. And then she would repeat. She spent a whole lifetime of doing this. And then when she got to the end of her life on her deathbed, surrounding by her loved ones, she realized she hadn't ran her race. And she regretted the time that she had wasted going to the church. I think that's what happened during the pandemic. I think everybody, when they needed it, it was a false sense of security. Church had become this destination of false sense of security that we felt like everything was okay when it absolutely wasn't okay. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Let's say you go to see your doctor, and the doctor says, Listen, you need to go join a gym. You need to lose some weight, you need to get in better shape, and you need to start making better decisions in your eating habits. And you say, okay. So you go find a gym, but you find this gym where you really like all the people, which is great. It's a great community. But the gym puts out food, snacks, and drinks, has TV playing, and it just kind of turns into a social thing. No one is really challenging each other to really learn how to use the machines. They kind of mess with them, but they really don't go after it. And no one is challenging and encouraging each other that once they leave the gym to make better decisions incrementally every day, better choices so they can have bigger long-term lasting effects in their life in the grand scheme. Well, years of doing this, you go back to your doctor. And the doctor says, I thought I told you to join a gym. It's kind of the same thing. See, Sister Christian on her deathbed realized what she had been doing. She realized all of the time she truly had wasted, that she had not been running her race. She had just been running to the table of encouragement and going back to her starting line. There was never any growth. It was just a false sense of security. But during the pandemic, it was such a shaking of all of us that we got to see that glimpse early before the deathbed. And it's not just the parishioners, it was the pastors too. I had friends that was pastors, and I said, it's like the report card is out. How's everybody done? I mean, how well have we done the people that should have been standing up in the dark with lit torches, leading the way of hope, becoming this city of light on the hill, were absent. They were also in the dark struggling. How did this happen? Listen, I'm not trying to slam the pastors or the church or the leadership therein, but we do have to look at ourselves in the mirror. We do have to figure out what happened. We do have to challenge ourselves to do better and be better. All pastors need to, all parishioners need to. We need to figure this out. The table of encouragement is needed to help us in our race. It is important. Just because it got messed up doesn't mean it can't be fixed. But I think a lot of this stems back to organized religion. And I'll kind of show you what I mean. But if you think of any denomination, I mean, if you think of a Catholic church, when you walk in from the decor and the structure of the service and the presentation, you know you're in a Catholic church. Same thing in a Baptist church, same thing in a Pentecostal church or in a non-denominational church. They all have a flavor. It's their brand. And it's just like a business. Once you have a brand that's successful, your priority goes to holding up that brand and making sure that it's always represented the same no matter where it's at, because that is the integrity. That's the mission statement. So now you have this organization that becomes big, that we call the church, and it's all about the certain flavor. That's what they represent. So people in the world that want to be in that flavor are going to come to your church because you represent the brand they like. And now people that's grown up into that community of that denomination, that indoctrination of their religion and that becoming their destination, they want to become leaders. These emergent leaders in the church now say, Hey, I want to be a leader, I want to do that. And they send them off to seminary. And there they teach them about their indoctrination, they teach them about their theology, they teach them how to run the organization, how to structure it, to get all of these things they need to do to basically run a satellite of that church. So they are representing that brand in a very uniformed way. They are a part of the integrity of that organization. And now they help present their church, their part of what they do as the destination. That's what they've been taught. It's about that organization. It's not about running your race, it's about coming there. And we've created this false idea of that being the destination. I mean, ultimately, these people were chosen by the organization to represent a denomination by how they looked, how they spoke, and how they presented. Because it was about brand. And then when the pandemic hit, we all got a reality check. And then we realized these weren't necessarily leaders leading us through life and helping us get to our race, our true destination. These were people that were simply representing their denomination. But aren't we told to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling that we are accountable for ourselves? Why are we pedestaling pastors and leaders in the church and making them the easy button and making them the destination? I mean, we're doing that because we don't want the accountability for ourselves. We don't want to have to put in the work. And the truth is, a lot of us, if we actually go to a really good table of encouragement where they start encouraging us and pushing us to run our race, we'll just go to a different table of encouragement that doesn't do that. Haven't we been a part of the problem too? Do we really want to run a race of faith? I think we like the idea of religion. We like the idea of going there once a week and being a part of a service we really enjoy, that's entertaining, that we like, that's not too challenging, that's just comfortable. There's this place in the Bible, it's in Matthew chapter 13, verses 24 through 26. And it's Jesus talking to his inner circle, and he's telling them about things that's going to happen in the future. And he qualifies everything he says by saying, And the kingdom of heaven is like this. In other words, this isn't the church and the world, this is just pertaining to the church. And then he tells them this story that I'm about to share with you. I'm going to just put it in modern terms. There's this landowner who had a very large farm, and he had these hired hands that work for him, and he wanted to grow wheat. So the hired hands are out there, they're getting the fields ready, they've done a good job. He gives them the seed, they go out and they sow the seed. But in the middle of the night, an enemy comes and sows another seed. And then as time goes on and the wheat starts growing, all the hired hands see this other plant growing with the wheat. Well, they go into a full panic meltdown and then go to the owner of the land and says, didn't you buy good seed? Do you not see what's growing out here? I gotta be honest, when I first was reading this story and really started studying it, I got really annoyed with these hired hands. I mean, just it seems like they were just creating drama until I started studying this word for this weed they're talking about. Zazenia is what it's called. But in our modern language, we call it darnell. And if you don't know what darnell is, darn is a certain species of weed. It's not just a weed, it's a species of weed that grows in the same life cycle as wheat. So it comes up with wheat, it looks like wheat, it grows like wheat, it produces grains or seeds, what we call grains like wheat, except it's not wheat. See, Darnell's poison. Not only is Darnell poison, it's a euphoric poison. And it reminded me of the late 1800s when they started developing these euphoric drugs. So you could have been through a horrible, horrible accident, but take something that's euphoric and it gives you a false sense of elation, that everything is okay even though it's not. You can be in the process of dying, and you still are going to feel like everything is okay when it absolutely is not. That's what euphoria means. It's false sense of elation. So it's interesting that Jesus would choose to tell this parable using Darnell. Because Darnell looks like wheat, it's with the wheat, except it doesn't produce the same fruit as the wheat. It produces poison. The commandment of Christ has always been love, and that we become discipled in how He loved. And if we're not careful, by making the church the destination, we end up becoming a euphoric poison, lolling ourselves into a false sense of security and never getting to where we need to be. See, it speaks to that idea that I talk about often, that a believer, a worshiper of the deity of Christ in the religion of, versus a disciple and becoming like Christ in that love. They're two different things. A church has its place. It's to encourage us to run our path, our race of becoming like Christ in a disciple of love. But making the church the destination and entangling that with indoctrination and denomination can become a euphoric poison. I don't think that any denomination has it right. But I don't think any denomination has it completely wrong either. They're ultimately just tables of encouragement. They have to serve that purpose. You can have whatever denomination you want, as long as you're using it for what you should be using it for. The problem comes in is when you take denomination, indoctrination, theology, and you put those things, that religion of above the commandment of Christ, or even worse, you take those things and you entangle it and encapsulate the commandment of Christ and kind of superimpose these other ideas and try to link them to it. And by doing all of those things, you log yourself into a false sense of security. You become the euphoric poison, not just to yourself, but to others, because that's the fruit that you bear. The commandment of Christ is always the priority. We're always to be pursuing discipleship of Christ in his love. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments, andor concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.