Lost Doctrines of the Church

Who, who is reading this, doesn't know that the Western church is in decline?

Yet, Jesus, the One whose Name the church lifts up, is the essence of power, grace, mercy, authority and love.

The church dies as its human leaders and as its people scurry, more feverishly than ever, to save it.

Still, nothing church people attempt reverses the decay.

Each strategy, plan, and program fails more pathetically than the one that came before it.

The rate of the church's decay extends exponentially in the way Stage 4 cancer ravages a body in the final throes of death. Who can avoid the stench?

And, as it putrifies, the church continues, without blessing, to lift up the Name of the One who is all power and grace and mercy and authority and love.

How is this happening?

There are many reasons for the decline but, in my opinion, one of the most basic is that the church is thinking about the wrong things, teaching the wrong things. And, at the same time, thinking about right things in the wrong way.

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From the first days it began chiseling its beliefs into granite in so-called creeds, the church has missed the spirit of the life and teaching of Jesus.

Jesus said that people who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed.  From the beginning, He told people curious about Him that unless their righteousness surpasses that of the Scribes and Pharisees they wouldn't see God's Kingdom. He commanded people to seek first God's Kingdom and His righteousness.  Paul of Tarsus noted that the Kingdom of God is a matter of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Yet, the church doesn't even have a category in its vast catalog of doctrines to consider what righteousness is. It has its Christology, its pneumatology, its eschatology and, of course, its ecclesiology...

(...if you don't know what those fancy church words mean, don't even think about looking them up.)

But, the church doesn't have and never has had a word for its teaching and beliefs about righteousness.

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The Greek word for righteous is dikaios. The word for righteousness is dikaiosune.

So, how about digging into what Jesus treasured and taught? Could we turn our hearts toward what Paul considered a thing the Kingdom of God is a matter of?

Righteousness!

If we must have big words, could we at least invent the word dikaiology!

Followers of Jesus today need to live the way Jesus commanded them to live.  They need to, as He put it, seek God's Kingdom, not God's church, and His righteousness.

They will be blessed if they hunger and thirst for righteousness.  But, the (institutional) church decays. It dies. So many are religious but few are righteous.

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A few quick observations:

Times of what is sometimes called revival were moments when people focused on what it means to follow Jesus by living rightly.  Those people stood apart from the religious of their day by turning to Jesus, not church tradition, to define the way they lived.  They defied church tradition, and they did it boldy. They turned to the way and teaching of Jesus. They sought God's Kingdom and God's righteousness.

Today's putrifying church defines right living in terms of itself, of the church, not as Jesus lived and taught righteousness.

Hence, in my tradition, to make more and better disciples still means to get people to attend a so-called church worship service.

Jesus almost never even spoke about church.

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We need to turn to Jesus.  We need to listen to what He said, to what He COMMANDED. We need to seek to live the way He lived. We need to follow His example.

We need to allow Him to call us to righteousness.  We need to live righteously, as He defined right living.

We must repent.