One of the best things about moving away for college is that you have the opportunity for the first in your life to make your own decisions about the things that are going to be important in your life. One of the biggest decisions I made after leaving home involved how I wanted to live my spiritual life and the things I felt were important to maintain my relationship with God.
Since moving away from home a year and a half ago, it has been made clear to me that, for now, God’s path for me may not follow any particular church, group of believers or Christian denomination. I have made the choice to be content living my life with the Lord independently of the paths of other Christians. I have chosen that for the time being, I am going to let my faith involve only the Lord and myself. I have made the decision to abandon organized religion while still maintaining my spirituality.
What does this mean? This means that I don’t faithfully attend any particular church. This means that I do not base my beliefs on the teachings of any particular religious denomination. This means that I get to worship my God when and how I think he should be worshiped, and I get to build my relationship with him on a personal level.
This wasn’t an easy resolution for me to come to. I was raised as a pastor’s kid, so the idea of going to church every Sunday is second nature to me. For 16 years my life revolved around the activities activities of my church. Church was a place of learning and safety and growth for me. It was where I met other people and served other people, and it was where I developed my spiritual identity.
However, in the last couple of years I have faced the many ways religion can be corrupted due to the judgmental and hypocritical nature of humanity. Certain circumstances caused me to question the validity of the church as being an essential ingredient for a Christian to be close to God. As a political science major, my job is to study the motives and ideologies behind the actions of people. I have come to find that instead being a place where Christians can grow in the Lord and help to build up others, the church has become a place where Christians go to build up there own pride and image among others. The world has already compromised its morality too much on behalf of politics, and it saddens me to see politics beginning to compromise the church.
Many of the Christians I know have only retaliated with criticism and defiance to try and understand my approach to religion, because they cannot face the fact that I can find peace in my spirituality while it exists outside of their own particular way of thinking. While I know that there are still many people within the church with righteous intentions and honest morals, I cannot find the strength within me to uphold and support an institution that claims to survive on a moral high ground but has the audacity to so hatefully scorn people who so minorly offend them. I love and I want to support other Christians, but I feel like I can only do so outside of the man-organized institutions that make up the body of Christ.
I think this is the biggest problem I have with organized religion. While trying to uphold their own moral standard the church has forgotten that in Matthew 22:37-40 the Bible says that the first great commandment is to love God, but closely following that it reads, "And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Above all Christians are called to love, and too often we sacrifice that because we do not want to accept that there are ways outside our own to be spiritual.
By not being involved in organized religion, I can more confidently know that the things I do for God I do because I love him and I want to serve him. I do not do things with the intended purpose making other people notice the deepness of my devotion. I do not compare my spirituality to others, in order to make myself feel more established in my own faith, and I do not put people down because their interpretation of faith deviates from my own. I am keeping myself from becoming subject to the validation of other people, because the only validation that I truly need is that of God.
Instead of attaching a spectacle to the practice of religion I have decided that, until God moves my heart differently, I want to walk my path with God unattached to a schedule, church or human religious standard. I have a personal bible study when God places it upon my heart, and I have adjusted my gaze so that I can find people outside the church who are struggling or who want to have meaningful discussions about religion. I am extremely grateful for the impeccable spiritual foundation I was given by my parents, but I do not want to limit my beliefs to simply what I was taught as a child or what I read in the Bible. I want to know how other people outside of conventional churches view spirituality and how it relates to religion so that I can expand my knowledge to better understand and love other people. I want people outside my predominate scope to challenge my way of thinking, so that I can explore outside the spiritual realm of my own comfort.
I didn’t come to this resolution quickly or easily, but after experiencing many difficulties with organized religion, I have found that this is the only way I can comfortably and confidently come before my God. After all, isn’t the intention behind organized religion lost when we approach God’s altar because we have to, or because it’s routine, or because it makes us look good in front of other people, or because we feel like it’s something we have to do in order to be a “good” Christian, and shouldn't the majority of our focus be on constantly repairing and strengthening our own relationship with God, instead of demonizing the validity of other people's spirituality?
