R.R. Reno has a book In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity
How do we choose our church, our denomination in the cafeteria that God and man has made of His Church? Mr Reno, in his book counsels Jeremiah/Nehemiah’s example of dwelling in the ruins. Holding to your faith and staying with the church of your childhood, when (or even if) that church’s praxis has or is veering about. To be a rock in the winds of change if that is how feel has scriptural parallels. But Mr Reno himself, sometime after writing his book, opted not to take his public advice and in his words (from a First Things essay) crossed the Rubicon and joined with Roman Catholicism. Like Mr Reno it seems, Mr Neufeld chose his denomination on doctrinal grounds and his church by finding a parish that was conscious of its practices and doctrine and not just a feel-good community of friends (which I gather against this practice is one of the points of Mr Neufeld’s essay).
People leave churches/denominations for a variety of reasons. They often leave churches, fleeing situations which they find intolerable, I think, most often this is because of interpersonal or issues of a “small political” nature, i.e., small group or personal dynamics. They leave denominations for different reasons, often being affronted by “large” political shifts and movements made by that church. In the last few years those of us in liberal mainstream protestant churches have all been witnesses to that. If one, like perhaps Mr Reno, has a well developed personal notion of a systematic theology and that theology is at odds with large scale changes in that denomination then that often becomes a motivation to change denomination for another niche in the cafeteria.
However, that is actually not why I’ve left my particular niche. The main reason for leaving is that after my conversion I had looked at the body of theology and having a notion of mistrust in “Theory”/modernist/post-modernist thinking I decided to begin my reading … at the beginning and have been trying and learning to read from our patristic church fathers writings. There is, I find, a lot more sophistication and completeness in to be found in the Late Antiquity writings. Even so, I’ll admit I’ve also read some and found much to consider in what little modern writings I’ve been pointed at by friends (blogs and the other kind), notably N.T. Wright and Jurgen Moltmann. But from the early writings … I’ve come to have a personal desire to explore asceticism and what later came to be called hesychasm. For me then, Orthodoxy provides a more insistent connection with patristic writings. Furthermore, they practice asceticism to a greater degree than any of the other established denominations, and were (and are) the source of the hesychast tradition. Basically, I’ve not left for doctrinal reasons but because I’m seeking a community which holds to practices which I want to explore.
A cafeteria…well, it’s an apt analogy. But it has happened before. In David’s day the question was, ‘Should we worship at Shilo, where the Tabernacle resides, or at Jerusalem, where the recaptured Ark resides?’ As in those days, we’ll have to wait and see how God will reunite the broken pieces of His people and His worship.
I left the church of my youth for reasons far separated from my current life – and left it for 20+ years of being a “hater of God”. I am a non-denominational evangelical – and the church of my youth was non-denominational.
I am now in my 5th church. One died. I left 2 because of geographical changes. In the last we were told to go help a fellow church get planted if the Spirit moved us. How do I choose them? The must be Bible-believing churches that teach expositionally – and they must feel “like home” when I first move in.
The current plant is the first intentional change to an intentional body from a church I loved for kingdom reasons. It doesnt feel like home yet but that doesnt matter.