My Growing Frustration

I’ve had enough. I’ve come full circle. I’m not impressed. I’m sorry, for all the good intentions, and even needed truth, I have had enough of those who have come to save the church from itself.

I can see it no other way. I wonder why it took me so long and I am embarrassed with the way I treated others. In an effort to get others to get it I totally didn’t get it.

I have spent the past few days reading, reading a lot of different writers. They make some very interesting points, and yet why is it that I feel so looked down upon after the exercise? Have I really learned so little? I grew up in a tradition that spoke for Jesus, really that is what they did. They told Jesus that he was most concerned with whether or not a group used instruments in worship. They told Jesus that what consumed him most was the frequency of the Lord’s Supper.

I understood all of that and rejected it. The problem is it just seems like a new group is telling me what Jesus would and wouldn’t do and say. So now Jesus is fully consumed with AIDS in Africa and he doesn’t care what words one uses to express it. If you don’t understand that then you must just be a “church” person locked into old ways of thinking that are spiritless. So now someone knows Jesus wouldn’t mind the F word. Same attitude, same way of speaking for Jesus, telling us what he really thinks.

Just as I didn’t know where people got the information that Jesus was consumed with instruments I find myself asking the same question with this new wave of teachers. This new group that wants to save me from the tyranny of mindless church rote. I am reminded of the book Animal Farm by George Orwell, and I can’t help but get this sneaky suspicion that this is exactly what is taking place. Someone is making claims and they sound so good and yet in looking down the road I’m not sure I’m not just trading masters. It is easy to tell someone what will fix everything but another to make that reality come true.

I was reading a blog by a guy I really respect and he was telling of a funeral that he recently did. She was 87, and as I read the wonderful story of her life, the hardships and struggles, the joy, I couldn’t help but wonder if she new she wasn’t emergent. I wondered if it bothered her that she was modern to the core. I wondered if it ever impacted her life that she felt obligated to go every time the church doors were open. I thought about her life and its beauty and said that after a lifetime of majoring in minors nothing had changed. I had just replaced one set of minors with a new one.

If only we did it this way or that. If only people got this or that, it would all be better. I’m not buying that one anymore. Never believe it when it sounds too good to be true. Never take the easy answer. A person wants to replace one shortcut with another. Everyone’s journey is different, just because they do not experience it as I do doesn’t make mine better or more right, it just makes it mine. How sad to fall into the same trap one is leaving, but that is the story of Animal Farm isn’t it?

I have officially stopped dreaming of the day the church will get it. I have jumped off the bandwagon. I am leaving the search for greener grass to fully embrace my wonderful lawn, weeds and all. I begin my backtrack journey.