Letters From Leavers

I have never known a time I didn’t love Jesus.

When I was a toddler I would sit on my mom’s lap with her while she had her devotions and talk to him.  As I grew up, Jesus and I had teaparties with mudpies, climbed trees together, laughed together–were best friends.  Since most of the sermons in church were over my head (or boring) I would just sit and read the Bible, and as I grew compared the God I read about in the Old Testament and the Jesus I read about in the New and wondered, with my child’s mind, where was He in the church?  It made no sense to me that I was taught to be afraid of the devil and his evil ways when I knew that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph was so much more powerful.  The Jesus I was taught in church was one of yesteryear, whose power was not relevant in contemporary times.  All through my youth I was taught that if anything supernatural (or anything we didn’t understand) really happened it was probably the devil.  This made no sense to me.  At an early age I understood that the church put God in a box.

As I got older I was told that the Jesus I played with growing up was just my imagination.  It was made clear to me that my ability to see things that other people couldn’t was either an overactive imagination, or worse, something demonic.  So I learned to tune out what I could and what I couldn’t I learned to keep my mouth shut about. Eventually I learned the hard way that I had pretty strong discernment of spirits and, eventually, a strong gifting as a seer.  I also learned that in much of the institutional church my gifting was not welcome.  It was not understood and thus feared.   I learned to rarely speak of it except to a few who quietly helped me learn about who the Father created me to be while continuing on with the various ministries using less controversial gifts.  Eventually I became part of intercessory groups and ministry teams and was able to exercise my gifting in those ways but still having to be careful about what I shared with whom, and how.

My husband always supported me.  The, uh, interesting experiences I would have, some of which he shared, caused him to stretch and grow as well.  I have never been satisfied with a spiritual relationship with the Lord that is less than what what the early church experienced, at the very least!  We are supposed to be the mature church, so should not our spiritual lives and relationships be more deeply connected and more powerful?  If we are not healing the sick and raising the dead with a fair regularity, why are we satisfied with less?   Where is our corporate passion for holiness, for Oneness?  If we do not know and live Jesus so that others can see Him, and see how our God is like no other gods, why on earth should those who do not believe follow Him and not someone like Buddha?  Just because we say so?  Where is the proof?!  How many new believers fall away when they start to read the Bible and see the disparity between the Acts church and today’s western churches? To quote a well-known commercial, “Where’s the beef?”

These are questions we struggled with.  Father had placed us in a church home we outgrew but where we obediently stayed and ministered to others, encouraged others to desire deep relationship with Christ, etc.  We stayed not because we wanted to but because we had not been released and still would be there ministering had He not very specifically released us.  Afterward we did the church search as good christians do, assuming that the reason for our release was it was time for us to go to another body.  We searched and searched, and after months of not being set in another church home were very confused!  I started digging deep, wondering what the Lord was doing that we were clearly missing, and together my husband and I put pieces together.  After a year of struggling and researching and much prayer, we had a huge paradigm shift.  We came to the conclusion that the Lord had deliberately pulled us out of the institutional church in response to our desire to dig deeper.

Our journey since then has been an adventure, and while frequently unpleasant and uncomfortable overall it has been good.  It has been a time where preconceived notions on what qualifies as “church” and “good christians” are being frankly examined and many discarded.  Most of all, it has been a time where religion has been stripped away from our faith.  Have we forsaken meeting with other believers?  No.  Jesus said that wherever there are two or more of us gathered, He is there in our midst.  We are still connected, but the connections are much more flexible and life-giving without the rigidity of what is the christian version of “politically correct”.

We have complete freedom to dig into Him however we are led, with whomever we are led, wherever we are led and ask questions that we would have never even considered asking before.  We minister to whomever we are led, however we are led, whenever we are led and wherever we are led.  It is simply part of life.

There has been much discussion about christians leaving the church, much of which has a tendency to center around a christian’s desire to leave, for whatever reason.   In focusing on individuals the bigger picture is missed:  this is not a move of man.  This is a move of God. For twenty years I have seen Him move in churches only to be shut down by leadership that does not want to cede control, by leadership (as well as lay people) determined to keep God in the boxes they have placed Him in.  He has asked to be let out and time again and I have seen people bound and determined to keep Him in their boxes, usually out of fear.

I believe He has honored the desire of people who want to keep the security of their boxes.  Many of those people fill up the pews Sunday after Sunday.  But He is also honoring the desire of those who wish to let God out of the box and the way He is doing that is by removing those people from the box of the institutional church.  As long as we ourselves are in the box we cannot see the box clearly.  It is dark; we understand that walls are there but cannot discern them from the inside.  No wonder some people still on the inside cannot understand what people on the outside are talking about!  We never realized to what degree we had put God into a box until we climbed out ourselves.

My encouragement to any reading this who are being called out:  go.   If you are struggling with the question, “Can this really be God?” my answer is yes.  Be prepared, it is not a safe place to be.  It is very uncomfortable to have all the things you thought you knew were true to be challenged.  It is very uncomfortable to question why you believe the things you believe.  Just know that God is not uncomfortable with your questions and your uncertainties.  He can handle them.  Trust Him. Firmly root yourself in Him and examine everything in light of scripture, of which you may gain some new understandings.  Your faith will take heat but will survive the refiner’s fire that burns your box away.

Blessings!