Giving up on church

This post is from the defunct blog “Dying Church”

I'm now on the brink of giving up, not Christianity, but church. Not the true church, not the community of Jesus-followers who journey together toward God for his pleasure and for the sake of others, but the organization that has replaced the living body. Too often, the whole church event feels like that, like a well-orchestrated event more than a throbbing-with-life community. The raw realism of the Bible is too often sugar-coated with cheerily optimistic promises that God wants you happily married, financially secure, and alive with a sense of adventure and romance. Whether it's a megachurch parading its A-team every Sunday before a packed house of struggling people who are helped to pretend things aren't so bad, or whether it's a single congregation of a hundred faithful members trying to believe that life can work better than it does, the problem is still the same: Too often the church is aiming its people toward self-fulfillment through God's blessings and away from the failure and pain that could bring people together as the community of the broken but loved and hopeful because of Jesus. I once gave up Christianity as I knew it and discovered Christianity as the Spirit reveals it. I'm now giving up on church as I've experienced it and looking for church as the Spirit designed it. (Larry Crabb, introduction to Reclaiming God's Original Intent for the Church)