The “Lone Ranger” Spiritual Life – is it possible?

June 26, 2007Posted inPersonal Background, Spiritual Life9 Comments

One essential element of living a thriving spiritual life is being part of a spiritual community. Being an independent-thinking kind of guy, I can’t say I really like this reality. When I was young, I was just part of a good community (which was composed of people from many, many churches) and didn’t think about things. When left home and went out on my own at college, I continued to go on autopilot – I attended a church regularly. Only when things went sour, after I had left college and started attending a bad church near where I worked, did I start to question the need for one. Can a person get along without a community of other spiritual people? Can a person live a thriving spiritual life by himself/herself?

Forgiveness

June 20, 2007Posted inBelief, Confusion, Motivations, Personal, Worldviews1 Comment

About three years ago, I had a very bad church experience. It colored how I thought about church for a long time after – that it was corrupt and imperfect, an entity that detracts from a person’s thriving spiritual life. However, I realized the other day that I have completely recovered from my anger towards all churches.

What was the thing that helped me?

Disputable matters

June 1, 2007Posted inDoctrinal Issues4 Comments

Elise got me thinking about an interesting topic based on my last post – the discussion of what is a sin for you is not a sin for me – i.e. disputable matters within Christianity. Even though the apostle Paul clearly stated how to deal with them, religious institutions have a hard time with them because they want to codify the sin lists into “doctrinal statements” – unfortunately including the issues that are disputable. This is just more religion piled onto otherwise healthy Christianity. By doing so, they are in violation of Paul’s command (and thus sin): to not “pass judgment on disputable matters” (Romans 14:1). I will not attend a church that has disputable matters in their doctrinal statements for this reason.

However, there might be some argument as to if a “disputable matters”-focused church is good. Could there be a church of weaker believers who can keep each other accountable in a common area of weakness?