Introduction

It was five years ago when I first realized I had to leave the church. It’s hard to describe how completely devastated I was by this. The church defined my whole world, everything from my weekly activities, to the origins of the universe to the meaning of my life. All of this was shattered when I left the church.

I tried not to. I thought that if I stepped back for a season, I would be able to step back in. Maybe I was just burned out. Maybe I was just misplaced.

But when I stepped back, it made things worse. I realized that I wasn’t burned out and that no tweak to my role would make a difference. Of course, I had my gripes about the church like everyone else. But this wasn’t about a few personal grievances. I knew to my toes that something was fundamentally off with church.

This was like having a bomb go off in my face. All around me were pieces of my former life and my own face, and none of them connected anymore. Nothing made sense.

You might say, “Of course your world didn’t makes sense. You were a pastor. You drank the Kool-Aid. You went too far.” But if you’re listening to this podcast, your world doesn’t make sense without church either. The church and western civilization have gown together for so long, that there is no separating them. Whether you like it or not, your life is a product of the church.

I felt this weird mix of church and culture when people came to me to ask me to perform their wedding ceremony. They didn’t believe the things I believed. Honestly, it made about as much sense as me going to a Buddhist monk to be married. Why did they do it? Because a church wedding is a cultural tradition. It’s just what you do. I suppose people want God’s blessing and thought maybe I could give it to them. I always felt like a prop, like the little man on the wedding cake.

The same thing happened at funerals. People called out of the blue to ask me to do a funeral. I would stand by the graveside, waxing eloquent about the sure hope of the resurrection, looking out on a sea of puzzled faces, knowing most of them didn’t buy a word I was saying.

And then, for me, leaving church left me tied up in knots about baptism and the Lord’s supper. These belonged to the church. How could I participate? And if I opted out of these sacred ceremonies wasn’t I opting out of God?

These questions were so hard because they are bound up with a fundamental mistake that has been a part of our lives for centuries, one that has come to define our whole existence. To abandon these traditions is to saw off the branch we are sitting on. It’s hard to get people excited about this.

But I am excited about this. And I want to warn you about today’s podcast. The things I am about to say are hard to deny. But they may create a sense of free-fall in your life, just as they did in mine. I began by tugging on a few loose threads of my religion and the whole ball came unraveled. The same thing will happen to you. Listen at your own risk.

Today I will investigate how we came to this strange, untenable place. I will start by asking what Jesus actually taught, then describe what happened instead. Finally, I will tell you what has to change.

What Jesus Actually Said

Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God was the announcement of the love of God calling all things to oneness with Himself and into harmony with each other. That’s what ecclesia is. Jesus kept the good news of God’s Kingdom carefully separate from any nation or human government. This point is stressed repeatedly. For example,

In the wilderness, the devil offered absolutely control of human government to Jesus. To this, Jesus replied,

“It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.’”

When Jesus announced his ministry as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s good news for the poor, the people of his home town rejoiced, but when he went on to say that the message wasn’t just for ...