This discussion post is a few days old, but the OP contains real reasons why young people themselves have said they leave churches of Christ. The young lady mentioned left the discussion group almost immediately after joining. Here is her stated reason why: Hello brothers and sisters. I am a young girl, 17 years of age, and a member of the church. Unfortunately this will be my first and last post to this group. There is no wrong in posting a question and us all searching for an answer. But that is what we need to be doing, searching Gods Word for the answer. See what He says about it, not what we think. I have been greatly disappointed in some of the bizarre things I have read on here! It saddens me, but there are certainly dissensions here. I will be constantly praying for all of you to hold close to The Lord and the truth He has laid before us Thank you.--B.H. My opinion is that this young lady obviously ran into a situation where she was not comfortable and the reasons she gave for leaving were common among those who have been taught the authoritarian interpretation of the NT. I say this because she seemed to assume that interpretation of the Bible was settled (that being what she was taught at church in the last 17 years) and/or that Gods word does not need interpreting just looking up and submitting to. There are behavior and attitude displays that I will not go into, but I do want to expose more about how our view of authority is what is causing the dependency and inability to stay around and cope with differing viewpoints, and especially why young people are dominated by university professors when they leave home. Authoritarianism does not allow any new information into its system. It demands submission. There is no place for how to think, only submission of what to think. My main reason for sharing this are the 6 REASONS given by young people themselves and the opportunity it gives me to expose a faulty view of authority that is not what I believe is taught by Christ nor His apostles. Here is my comment (that is also in the thread) in response to the 6 reasons. It is also influenced by others comments. I hope that you will join the conversation, as well. There are some good comments in the existing discussion (with one or two comments that should be PMs), but the thread of comments is not so long that the discussion cannot be renewed. I hope that it will. I wrote: What I immediately noticed was how authority is at the source of this problem as well as Greek Dualism in separating worship from the rest of life. When kids are taught all their lives to submit to the authority of coC clergy, then when they are born into their own worlds at college or leave home, then they submit to that authority, because that is what they were taught at church. When they are taught that their elders are responsible for their souls instead of them being responsible for themselves, then they remain dependents and vulnerable. This is why elders dont go looking for sheep, because they just spent the last 18 years conditioning their young to be robots to authority of men and their solution to everything is go to church and submit to the authority--not truth. They are not taught how to think for themselves in order to obey God, they are taught what to think in order to submit. We need to get rid of our top down authority model that is an excuse for elders to delegate to a gospel preacher, and we need to get rid of meeting for acts of worship at a public (government) building or at least meet for a meal and fellowship in them to build relationships. The current school house church-model is a mixture of the State and Church and that admixture corrupts the church and we wonder, Whats happening to...? As long as we have professional Christians who do things for us and an oligarchy who decides things for us and who maintain control through a church treasury, then these problems will not go away. We are missing it on authority, because we imitate the State Governments of men and their methods. We inherited this in the 1800s and tweaked a few terms to be a different form of institutionalism. We need a paradigm shift in authority and the clergy laity thinking and behavior. We need to be servants not rulers--not an admixture of servant ruler. Institutionalism is a very selfish form of Christianity DESIGNED to cater to the few who have deceived themselves and others by doing things for them, because they believe chaos would reign if they were not in control when in fact chaos is reigning BECAUSE they are in control. People only control themselves and when this truth is denied and others must control them (think police, prisons, etc.) or they have institutionalized a system where those who desire to control themselves are forbidden by the few then they will leave in search of their freedom Christ died to give them (Gal. 5:1).
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:20 +0000
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