catapult magazine

Wonderful responses from Alice, Bill, and Liv to my rantings against the ?organized? church. Thanks.
I don?t worry too much about people misconstruing my sex from my name. I only brought the subject up because we are trying to get to know one another, and it perhaps matters a little that we know to whom we are speaking. {I became ?Sandy? in self-defense, because my parents bestowed two last names on me – Sanford Wilbur – and Wilbur Sanford (or Wilbur Stanford, in many cases) seemed to be most people?s choice for which was the proper last name. Sandy Wilbur was harder to turn around.}
There seems to be the implication in most of the responses that, because people ?went to church? at the time the New Testament was being written, then the organized church with officers and buildings must be the God-accepted way to ?gather together.? But was it, or were people just continuing on in an old comfortable format? I think we have a tendency to view what happened in New Testament times as a record of what God really WANTED, rather than as a history of what people DID. It?s funny, because we have no trouble viewing the Old Testament as a history of both the right and wrong things that people did in response to God. No question that Peter and Paul were good men trying to do the right things, but they clearly were often more concerned with keeping order in this new ?religion? than they were with living with the freedom that Jesus had bestowed on them and us. Are we guilty of accepting the shackles of a comfortable church experience instead of really living together as a body?
I think Alice?s comments show the paradox of having known real freedom to worship and get to know one another in informal settings, yet feeling an obligation (maybe even a guilt?) to the formalized structure. For myself, I?ve found that most ?church? is pretty sterile compared to the sharing, question asking, digging, spontaneity of smaller, closer groups.
Once, when I was teaching an adult Sunday School class in southern California, I teased the class with an alternate view of tithing than what we are used to. I argued that giving 10 percent back to God was an Old Testament concept, and that the true ?Christian? posture should be that all 100 percent is God?s. That doesn?t mean that God is going to take all ?our? money away from us, so that we have to go out and live off the community, but that if we are in a 10 percent mindset, we may find ourselves missing God?s call to give more (or maybe even less, sometimes). A chintzy 10 percent tithe might be a major act of disobedience. One wonderful old saint (someone I highly respected) countered that, while I might be philosophically right, she wasn?t going to take the chance of being wrong, so she would continue to give her 10 percent ?religiously.? Maybe I was too subtle, but it seems to me that she wasn?t taking the ?safe? route at all; she was taking what had become the ?comfortable? route. Is that what we?re doing with our organized churches, too?

Sandy Wilbur
Religion for Thinkers: http://www.netcom.com/~symbios/relig.html

Amen to Sandy on the 100% thing. What makes me crazy is how easy it is for churches (and us) to think that just means money when Jesus was clear it is all of our lives he wants