I typically don’t like the “prophecy” genre in speeches and blogs. I’ll try to be concise with details and avoid excess superlatives.
I was dreaming, on a Bible college campus, watching the Dean make his rounds. He had a complex system of inventing rules “after the fact”, but he’d always get away with enforcing them as if everyone should have known better, when, actually, he was just playing “gotcha”. Student leaders and staff helped him. And, generally, he just made everyone angry—a professional ass.
I decided to reason with him, to convince him to stop giving injustice, to inject as much common sense into this lunatic as possible, even though it would be a very small amount, if I could inject any common sense at all. But nothing worked. As I looked at him, his face, not his voice, was my grandfather’s face—with two exceptions. He had three or four warts on his face. My grandfather didn’t have warts on his face. And he had anger in his eyes. My grandfather didn’t have anger in his eyes.
Nothing in the dream exactly resembled anything I knew. The Dean slightly reminded me of the Dean of Students at Moody, but that Dean, though a little tough, actually did more good than harm—which is the goal of any administrator. The Dean in my dream was just useless. The room wasn’t familiar to me. Everything seemed to be some form of symbol, based on what I knew in my life, not anything exactly from the life I live.
It was a vivid dream and even during it, I felt that it had a strong purpose. Even while dreaming, I wanted to know if God had any message for me in it. As I was reasoning with the Dean toward the end of the dream, it became clear that he was so insane that he probably wasn’t even aware that I was a human trying to talk with him. He was so lost in his little world of his own ideas that he couldn’t connect to others. As I made my final attempt to get a word in edgewise, my alarm went off… It was time to wake up.
I hit the alarm button, but knew I couldn’t return to the dream I’d just woken up from. How would I be able to finish the dream to figure out what it meant? Being that God knows the timing of everything, if the dream had a meaning, the alarm was probably part of the message of the dream. What did it mean? Had I just woken up from an archaic religious tyrant’s nonsense? Or had I just woken up from the “dream” of hoping that the old nonsense could be reasoned with? Being that I literally woke up from both, I think God was trying to say that it’s time to just wake up.
No more nightmare of the old religious system of Churchianity, with its stupid, oppressive, extrabiblical rules. And no more trying to reason with generations that are so old, entrenched, and disease-ridden that their faces are even marred.
It’s just time to move on.
This morning is the last day of the urgent call to prayer from Anne Graham Lotz. Early in the week, just after the last faith-related blog entry, I made one last attempt to reason with the archaic system. FAIL! And all week, Kansas City has been saying, “The alarms are going off. Wake up, Church!”
Yes, we need to wake up from our sin. We need to wake up to the many, real problems upon us—all of them. But we also need to wake up from the dream of trying to make Sunday morning Churchianity work when it’s long past the time that the business world would have allowed it to fail. Sunday morning is not “the Church” that will prevail against hell. It is hell—nice and seductive at first, then leads to the very sin it openly condemns. Every organized Sunday morning congregation, given enough time, will eventually fail. We think it’s natural. It’s not. The Church is not condemned in the Bible to go through the same economic cycles as Wall Street.
It’s over. It’s done. I’m burying any and all hopes of cohabitating with Churchianity. Time and again, the system and their friends have proven to be incapable of preserving their own usefulness. They can’t end their own problems. Their friends can’t convince them to lay down their power games. They love reasons for denominational division more than reasons for unity. They can’t be reasoned with. And I realized, this morning, that God wants me to stop trying. He wants me to wake up to the fact that He stopped trying a long time ago. Like the generation in Israel’s wilderness, Churchianity just needs to march in circles until it finally dies.
The world is disinterested in Churchianity’s bureaucracy as well as the Sunday morning dog and pony show. People need Jesus unfettered and Bible served straight up without apology or disclaimer—and you’ll never get that on Sunday morning. If nothing else, Sunday morning will tell you that Sunday morning is “necessary”, which it isn’t. What we need is good, old fashion initiative in our daily walks with Christ and in seeking-out meaningful friendships with other authentic Christians.
Sunday morning claims that people won’t seek Jesus without “accountability”. But who holds us accountable to drink coffee every morning? And would we stop going to the restroom without a daily voice mail from the “pastor”? I see more evidence on YouTube of Americans being dedicated to League of Legends than to Jesus, and no one holds them “accountable” to play League. When you love something, you don’t need to be badgered into doing it week after week.
Frankly, if I have to badger you into “loving Jesus”, I’m really not interested in talking to you about him. I’d be dragging an anchor. Such people would probably just hold me back in my own friendship with Jesus—oh, wait, that’s already been happening. It was a bad dream that I just woke up from.