My buddy Glenn started a Synchroblog, and I am just getting the opportunity to post now.
One of my earliest memories I have is walking down a hall in a Southern Baptist church in Waukegan asking the pastor about Jesus. I still have this recollection vividly in my head. I was probably around 2 1/2 years old. I dont remember much else but remember that hallways, his face, and that question vividly for some reason.
Shortly thereafter, our family moved to a new up and coming church on the north end of Waukegan called Wesley. From age 3-28 I spent most of my days being served and serving in this community of church as I knew it. I also feel I spent the better part of my high school and college days trying to explain what exactly a Free Methodist was vs a united or other methodist. I guess to this day I still dont have a clear answer on that one!
Mixed into those 25 years were sprinkles of a southern baptist school, a non denom school that mainly fell in line with the Evangelical Free doctrine, which was about as close to a Free Methodist as you could get. Then high school came and the charasmatic world I never knew of was brought into my life with the assemblies of God.
I think from the early junior high days I often had questions about the Bible, God, relevance of the Old Testament, etc, but most of the time was too scared to ask, or was told dont bother asking because it was wrong to question anything.
From that came several life changing experiences brought on by greed and other self inflicted wounds which then brought me back to being involved in church boards, committees, youth leadership, and a struggle to turn a church stagnant for decades around. As my digust for denominational ties grew year after year, I think I was finally pushed over the edge after visiting Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, and then attending the Emergent Conference in 2003 in Nashville. Everything that stirred in my head was being discussed in great detail at this conference. I had no idea so many others had the same questions and concerns I did.
Now 5 years later it is even more clear the church in general has skewed heavily from the path of Jesus. It’s a tough pill for pastors especially to hear. Even this weekend at the Everything Must Change conference, I heard a pastor stating how hard it was going to be for him to continue messages with what he now was feeling as a complete and utter failure of his leadership and denomination. I know how awful that must feel. 25 years in a church and now to be basically considered an outcast. I may have not been collecting a pay check, but the ties still hurt, as I am sure Glenn can fully attest to.
Now the focus is smaller and more simple to me. Our second attempt at the house church model after the first folded due to a number of reasons including moves by other families and I am more happy now than ever. We have lots of unanswered questions, but as one of our “elders” (inside joke) noted this past weekend it has been TRULY astonishing what God has done in a small group of committed followers. And it also is not to say look at us, its definitely more look at what God has done in spite of us and our faults.
Now raising three young children I am often asked what about them, how do you teach them? Dont you wish they were in a more structured Sunday School class as I was growing up? No honestly I dont. And it puts all the more pressure on us as parents to live out a life pleasing to Jesus each and every day, teaching them daily, not once a week on Sunday mornings. My son attends a local “Christian” day care, and while I do believe they are doing an above average job of teaching basic things and are loving people, I do struggle with the little things I may not want him to necessarily learn. Take the story of David. It glorifies him killing to achieve peace. And we wonder why so many in the church condone war and death when it has to do with “honor of our country”. I often think about shortly after Sept 11th when Rob Bell noted at what point do we put the Flag above the Cross? I think instilling those morals in our kids is just as important. I dont know where the future lies. I honestly hope the number of house churches and small church plants continues is massive upwards motion and standard church as we know it dissolves. I know thats a real scary situation for all those in seminary and those basing their lives off of tithing income, but I think its a direction I would love to see continue…..
April 8th, 2008 - 11:50 am
Jason ~ I love the stories. They can be so healing and reassuring, both for the teller and the hearer. Thanks for being honest. I value your friendship on the journey.
April 8th, 2008 - 11:57 am
[...] Jason Ellis: Why I Ended Up A Free Charismatic Southern Bapti-Methodist Nondenominational Christian … [...]
April 8th, 2008 - 11:30 pm
“Why I Ended Up A Free Charismatic Southern Bapti-Methodist Nondenominational Christian … ”
Something else directed me to your Blog, a few days ago, and I’ve checked back a few times. I’m a little older at 51 now, and the path has been a little different. But, it has passed through similar ports. I was BORN and grew up the son of an Assemblies of God minister, and went to an AG college. I was accepted and planned to go to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deer Park, IL to study Philosophy of Religion. I was contacted by the department chair at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green to study philosophy, where I attended a Free Methodist Church. When I came home, married, and moved from Houston to New Hampshire for a year, I attended a contemporary Four Square Church that met in a business park.
After returning to Houston, we returned to my father’s church until he left it and for the past 12 years we have been members of a Southern Baptist church with our now teenage daughters. Our younger pastor has been a sound teacher and maintained contact and counsel with many house and outreach ministries in the city. He has tied to encourage the church in cell group ministries the entire time and it has served the members who pasrticipated, but on the whole, the church has never made it a primary and expanding focus.
I need to retire tonight and have a busy day tomorrow, but I’ll return. Right now I’ll just say that I’m near certain that you are on the right track. The denominational model is waning and a vital Christian church must evolve new ways to meet the demands of a changing world and more fully express the message and person of Jesus. I’ll get back to you.
Larry Perrault
April 9th, 2008 - 9:15 am
Thanks for stopping by and checking back in Larry. I appreciate your thoughts and insight. Look forward to hearing more from you! Blessings.
April 11th, 2008 - 8:29 am
Hello. For me, it’s been a relatively physically busy week. I have multiple sclerosis, and have had a few medical and conference outings, this week. I still walk with a walker and the exercise is good for me, but a few hundred yards tires me out. I haven’t been active on my Blog nearly daily, like I was for over a year, only putting up a few posts over the last month. But, I’m sure I’ll be back after it son, widening the lens from the almost uniquely political focus of the campaign, to a more general view of life from the perspective of a philosophically-inclined Christian with the narrowed vantage point of someone who doesn’t even drive, anymore. It’s a little bit like watching life through a scope, rather than from within the din.
I just reread what I wrote, specifically focusing on the last hasty paragraph. What immediately leaps to mind when I discuss the decline of the traditional denominational church paradigm, is this fact: Many Christians here don’t see or think about it, with their own near-sighted perspective on their church and what they perceive through television or other popular media. But, the vital church today is not in the West, which may incline to focus on its own navel. Sometimes we might tend to think that if it isn’t on television, it isn’t happening. But, our pop-culture circus is just a small outpost of God’s work in the world, and a relatively less vigorous one at that.
The West is the original trail of the Christian faith, beginning with Paul’s journey to Rome and the establishment of The Roman Catholic Church and its spread through Europe, and then The Reformation and the subsequent splintering into tens of thousands of doctrinal confessions. But of course, vital Christianity isn’t about confessions, which is the historical model of Christianity in the West, from Catholicism on, which only makes a new “Law” of Christianity.
The essence of Christianity is the person of Christ, relationship to him and the model of his servant hood of the Father and men. Vibrant Christianity is in Asia, Africa, and South America, what was in my boyhood known as the dark, “Third World.” Mostly in a cell/house/personal model, Christianity is burgeoning in those places, while in America it is like a smattering of campfires and in Europe just some smoking embers. America has treated “church” just like another market commodity. We can choose the one that serves OUR wants and needs, and churches market themselves suitably: here’s what we have for YOU. But, as Rick Warren opened his book, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” it isn’t about YOU.
That personal approach that has set wildfires around the world has not been able to catch on back here in our established culture. It’s harder to set fire to plastic. But, it’s the good news of Jesus and the apostles and isn’t subject to market strategizing. We have to look past the packaging and look at the prize. The prize is what people embrace in less cosseted cultures, where they choose it above other diversions and there choices will have consequences for their lives, including possible persecution, from being socially outcast or ridiculed, to even imprisonment, torture, or death. Do we think we’re important with our budgets and buildings and TV/radio ministries? God can use that too, but if we think we are ahead of the game with just that, we are simply WRONG!
Remember that stuff in the gospels about the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and Paul’s words about a “treasure in earthen vessels? (excuse my King James memory) Those are the kinds of things we need to always bear in mind: Focus on humility and the prize beyond ourselves.
I need to get ready for another little trip, but I’ll be back and I’m glad I crossed paths with you.
April 13th, 2008 - 10:28 pm
I listened to the audio of Dan Kimball’s, “They Like Jesus, Not The Church.
It speaks to what many people have who have looked at patterns for Christianity and The Church: specifically about what perceptions of Christ and The Church are in American culture. Summed in the title, They Like Jesus, Not The Church. Early on, he shows a video and you hear peoples’ responses to the questions of what they think about Jesus and Christianity, for the most part that Jesus was cool, but Christians aren’t and messed up Jesus’ message.
Generally, that’s no surprise. I have for a long time said that Jesus’ biggest obstacle is usually Christians. But, most striking is the last one who says that Christians are mostly people “who should be taken out back and shot because they don’t apply the love is everything message of Jesus…” A lifetime member of the Christian church culture’s purely visceral reaction is, “Oh…yeah…unlike people who think other people should be taken out back and shot…” Of course, it is the Christians who have the obligation of their faith to be perceived otherwise.
Honestly, in the past thirty-five years, through my teen years, college, early marriage and parenthood, I have been affiliated with 6 or 7 churches, and none of them comported with the caricature of this group of comments about “Bible-thumpers,” “judgmental, “dogmatic,” “closed-minded,” “un-Christlike,” etc… However, it only takes a handful of people who offer anything to enhance these ideas to affirm them in the public mind, especially when the entire culture is sautéed in mass-communications, both electronic and print, which paint and largely define those very preconceptions. And honestly, such inclinations are probably more prevalent in other churches, because they are not places that I would likely have established or maintained affiliation with.
And also, this caricature is attendant with a traditional model of practice that is not wrong but is also not at all essential to the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, while churches may not be dominated by these hard-edged and hard-hearted attitudes that are mentioned, they still often maintain the model of practice with which those characteristics are identified.
Anyway, we need to assertively disjoin Christ from conventional models not only because they don’t effectively reach today’s unbelievers, but also because right or wrong, they unnecessarily identify Christ with negative preconceptions. We need to adapt ourselves; not morally or theologically, but practically. Obviously, Paul wasn’t talking about compromising the gospel when he said,
1 Corinthians 9:19-23 (Contemporary English Version)
19I am not anyone’s slave. But I have become a slave to everyone, so that I can win as many people as possible. 20When I am with the Jews, I live like a Jew to win Jews. They are ruled by the Law of Moses, and I am not. But I live by the Law to win them. 21And when I am with people who are not ruled by the Law, I forget about the Law to win them. Of course, I never really forget about the law of God. In fact, I am ruled by the law of Christ. 22When I am with people whose faith is weak, I live as they do to win them. I do everything I can to win everyone I possibly can. 23I do all this for the good news, because I want to share in its blessings.
Yes, I can recite the King James from memory. But, who would I do that for?