There’s been some discussion today about a blog entry by someone called the Internet Monk. He was compared favorably (and presumably similarly) to the ‘emergent church’/Blue Velvet Elvis/Brian McClaren ’stuff’ by someone who’s read them all. I read the blog entry, but haven’t read the ’stuff’ to which it was compared.
This man makes some astounding claims.
…God ruined church for me for the rest of my life.
I met people from every denomination you can think of who loved Jesus, believed the Gospel and wanted others to do the same: Episcopalians, Disciples, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, Crazy Church of Christ, Pentecostals, Charismatics, mongrels, mutts, whatevers. I prayed, worshiped and witnessed with these folks.
It ruined me, and it was God’s fault.
This just boggles the mind. GOD ruined church for this guy. My eyeballs may need to be surgically rescued they’ve rolled so far back. Given the second quote, you’d think he’d come to a different conclusion, after all, God didn’t make all these denominations! But no, he says it again, that fellowshiping with all these people and seeing that they all love God, believe the Gospel, and want others to as well RUINED him… and it was God’s fault!!
No. This is not God’s fault that church is ruined for the Internet Monk. It is man’s fault.
- Man rebelled against God.
- Man decided that he didn’t want to obey those God had placed in authority over them.
- Man decided that regardless of what Christ said about obeying those in the seat of authority despite the inhabitants personal wickedness, he didn’t want to wait for God to deal with the person Himself.
- So man broke away from God’s Church and set up altars for himself.
- He began to make his own buffet line of beliefs, deciding he knew better than the Church what was right in God’s eyes.
- In a stunningly brief amount of time, men continued that rebellion exponentially… splintering further and further.
- Now many of the beliefs held by the many thousands of denominations around the world are heretical, agreeing only in small and rapidly diminishing bits with the Church God created and placed apostolic authority in.
It truly has become the ’shopping mall’ the Internet Monk describes… but it was man who did it, not God, and in doing so it was man who damaged the Church, not God.
In addition, the Internet Monk has ruined the Church for himself. He is doing the same thing all those other people throughout history have done. What we (protestants, former in my case) all have done. We’ve gone through and cherry picked what we like from the buffet. I’ll have a little OSAS, because I like security. Oh, and I don’t want baptism to wash away sin, nope… I like that whole prayer thing… but no way am I going to admit to any authority over me but the Holy Spirit and He speaks to me direct so you people are all wrong if you don’t believe what I do. The Internet Monk is doing what is right in his own eyes, and calling it godly. Sacred scripture disagrees.
So here the Internet Monk sits, proudly claiming how God ruined church for him. Talk about taking the easy way out. Easy to blame God and pretend you are holier because of it (though that is frankly a new level of delusion to me, he seems to have pulled it off). In doing so, he totally bypasses the difficult position of ACTUALLY aligning himself with what God has said about His Church because I can tell you RIGHT now that is NOT a popular place to be. With this position, no one fusses because you don’t compromise over how they do things… because in the Internet Monk’s position you get to ‘like’ things about them all, and don’t have to hold to the standards God has set to the exclusion of all others. Instead, he sits back in self-righteousness claiming he is above it all, and claims it’s all God’s fault that he can’t fit into any of those churches… and he lumps the Catholic Church into that mess. Am I the only one pulling out hair in fistfulls?
He goes on to say…
I doubt if God cares how many different ways we gather, worship, work or do mission.
Really. I’m wondering if this guy reads his Bible at ALL? God VERY much cares how we gather, worship, work and do missions, especially the worship part! I know I said this recently, but do Nadab and Abihu ring any bells? What about all those details about the temple, about who could enter the Holy of Holies, about what they were to wear, how they were to make offerings? God is pretty. darn. picky. if you ask me… as is His RIGHT! How on EARTH does one read the Old Testament and keep thinking that God doesn’t care how we worship!??!?!
The blog entry goes on, but it just leaves me depressed and in mourning. This is not what drawing closer to God looks like. This is not what unity looks like. We do not become more godly by drawing further out into an ever more self-righteous and individualistic Christianity or by painting God as a loving eunuch who is groveling and grateful for whatever offering feels good to us in the moment!
It isn’t that I don’t understand what the Monk sees. I too see things of God in each denomination… strengths that they contribute to the Body of Christ, the bits of truth they have left. However there is a place where the Body of Christ is unified and all those strengths are present, and were we to reconcile ourselves to the Church as God saw fit to create it we’d have all their strengths more fully present. Yet it wasn’t the strengths that I saw predominating in the protestant churches of my experience.
It wasn’t God who ruined the church for me. It was the Christians. Over and over, it was the Christians who let me down and threatened to ruin the church for me. I kept telling myself, you can’t count on men (as in mankind). Men will fail you every time. You can’t blame God for their failures. That was what enabled me to not see the church as ruined… and in the end, it was God who saved the church for me. When I finally stopped fighting to have it my way, and really let go and let Him show me the Truth… He showed me His Church. Coming into His Church, I still found similar problems to the ones elsewhere… but I found so many things that all those other churches didn’t have. They didn’t have the Real Presence. They didn’t have unity. They didn’t have grace. They didn’t have the Sacraments through which God braces broken men. They didn’t have the wealth and depth of faith and practice. They weren’t worshipping under the Authority God left for us, submitting to the shepherds He has given. They weren’t really worshipping at all. They were having lectures, singing and social hour. The strengths and support found in His Church have made battling the problems possible because we are family. We are one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. Obedient to what God has said is worship. We don’t limit God. God has limited us, and in doing so, set us free.
