All religions lead to God; the church has no monopoly
Should world religions merge their identities, drop their distinctive doctrines, and simply realise that everyone is worshipping the same God? Is there any point in staying divided when really all religions lead to God?
It's an attractive thought - on the face of it. If different religions are just attempts to locate God inside our 'centre of stillness', why can't they all be one?
But wait a minute. At least one major religion - Christianity - claims strongly that God isn't inside our 'centre of stillness' (whatever that may be - but then that's another question). Christians claim that humans are naturally cut off from God by the evil in human nature. That the only way for people to contact God is for someone to deal with the problem of evil for us. And that only one person, Jesus Christ, was ever able to do that. So only Christianity can lead us to a true relationship with God. The other faiths are doomed to failure before they start, because they assume that God is somewhere within - and he isn't.
Another problem. When you say that 'all religions' lead to God, what exactly are you including? It's very difficult sometimes to decide what is and isn't a real religios. Are you including in 'all religions' faiths such as Satanism? Faiths that involve human sacrifice and ritual child slaughter? The sick sadism of the Charles Manson cult and the mind-bending techniques of David Koresh who persuaded his followers that all the women should sleep with him, and the entir group should die fighting for him, in his Waco fortress in 1992? 'All religions lead to God'? Really?
In fact, if all religions do lead to God, three things follow which aren't so attractive. First, none of them tell us anything worth knowing. Because they all disagree on the most basic points! Some say God's a peron; others that there are many gods; others that God is just an impersonal force. Some say we live once, and then are judged; others say we come back for life after life. Some claim this world is real; others claim that 'reality' is just an illusion. If all these religions really have an equal claim to be believed, in fact they cancel one another out, and we're no wiser than when we started.
Second, if all religions lead to God, God can't care very much about us, or he'd have made his signals a little more clear. What kind of God allows this sort of confusion to continue - allowing the Hindus to believe one thing, for Muslims another, the Christians another, and all of them to fight and argue about it? Isn't it more believable that, if God truly does care about us, he would make himself clear once and for all, in one conclusive revelation, rather than spending wild rumours around the planet? And in fact this is exactly what the Bible says did happen:
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son... The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being...
Finally, if all religios lead to God, Christianity is automatically excluded, because it claims uniqueness for itself. 'I am the way and the truth and the life,' announced Jesus. 'No one comes to the Father except through me.' Either you dismiss his claim as an arrogant lie, and forget about Christianity; or else you start to consider the possibility that just maybe, in this one way, God did give the ultimate revelation of himself to human beings. There is no third option available.
I can worship God without needing to belong to a church
Religion used to be what brought people together. Churches, temples and synagogues were packed for services. The religious building used to be the centre of the community - the meeting point, the gossip exchange centre, sometimes the school and the hospital too. Now all that has changed; we've become a much more private society. We would rather stay at home and watch the hymn singing on television.
As a result, many people reject the idea that you need to go to church in order to worship God. 'I can appreciate him much betterin the open air,' they say. 'You can worship God on your own in the countryside much better than in a stuffy church.'
I wonder just how many people who go out for a Sunday run in the country do actually spend any time worshipping God. But never mind. Is the objection valid anyway?
Certainly it isn't churchgoing which makes you a Christian. You may attend a church all your life, sing in the choir, hand out the hymnbooks, teach in the Sunday school, and still not be a Christian. The New Testament constantly exhorts those who belong to churches to be absolutely sure that they really are Christians. Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.' 'See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.' It isn't how you spend your Sundays, but where your heart is, tha decides whether or not you are a Christian.
And, sadly, some churches are not very special. Some are dreary places with little life and vigour, which wouldn't help anyone get more excited about his faith. But that's no excuse for writing them all off.
In fact, when you become a Christian, you automatically become part of the church too. The Bible makes this clear. The two things are tied together and can't be separated:
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow-citizens with God's people and members of God's household... you too are built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
It should be natural for Christians to be together. The writer of Hebrews ends a long discussion of what it means to be a Christian - having your sins completely forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus' life - by saying, 'There, brothers... let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another.'
Why is this? Because Christians need one another. They can give one another help, encouragement and support; on their own, they might be tempted to give it all up in despair. They can stretch and challenge one another, and bring the best out of each other; on your own, you can become fat, selfish and lazy. They can learn how to grow in love and sensitivity to one another; on your own, you'd miss all the richness of this. And they can contribute something valuable to each other. The New Testament says that all Christians have 'spiritual gifts', abilities which God has given them to use for the benefit of others. When we use our 'gifts',
Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to us.
If you try to worship God without belonging to a church, you may just manage to hang on to some sort of impoverished Christian experience. But you'll miss out on the true variety and excitement of real Christian living. That comes to you only through other people.
If the church was really Christian, there wouldn't be so many splits and division
It has been estimated that there are more than 21,780 sects and denominations within the Christian church. That's an awful lot of warring points of view. Ministers can fall out with his congregation and leave to start a new church; families can leave their own church because of disagreements; other new groups can move in, to begin operations in competition with the fifty or so churches that already exist in the area. If they're all Christians, why on earth can't they all agree?
Christians don't pretend to be perfect. Christians are as liable to make mistakes, lose their temper, and do unworthy things, as anyone else in the population. The only difference is that Christians have admitted their failures to God and are actively allowing him to remodel their lives. So it's unrealistic to expect churches to be model communities of faultless, saintly people.
Splits and divisions in the church are no new thing. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written to churches where squabbles were going on! And the New Testament writers obviously expected Christians to have problems with one another - judging by the emphasis they place upon such qualities as 'longsuffering', 'patience', 'gentleness'. There would be no need for these virtues if the church was a perfect place!
In fact, all religions tend to have these divisions. Nothing uglier has happened between rival groups of Christians than has happened between the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Islam. Fringe groups like the Baha'is and Ahmaddiya hve been persecuted by brother Muslims. Between the two wings of world Buddhism, Therava and Mahayana, there is a profound philosophical divide. Personalists and impersonalists within Hinduism exchange bitter insults. Human beings are the same everywhere...
And it would be wrong to assume that because Christians wear different labels and attend different churches, they can't get on. I (Chomps) have worshipped, played musical items, and listened to God's Word with Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Catholics, and Evangelists! I loved the fire it flamed in my heart. As long as what's been said does not contradict with my faith and the Bible, different denominations really isn't a problem at all!
What unites Christians is not an identical outlook on doctrinal matters, or membership of the same group of churches. What forms genuine, invisible bond between real Christians is their uncompromising commitment to follow Jesus Christ, and the experience of a new life they have received from him. Everything else is secondary. And once you've experienced the love of Christ creating a supernatural bond between yourself and people who are totally unlike you in every way - you start to realise just how real the new life is!
There are too many hypocrites in the church
There certainly are a lot of hypocrites in the church. People go to church for all sorts of reasons: the impress the neighbours, to cultivate the boss, to hunt down a husband, to compensate for loneliness. But then they go to football matches, or the pub, for all these reasons too. have you ever heard anybody say, 'I'm not going down to the pub any more because they're all hypocrites down there. They're not really interested in beer'?
Maybe the problem is that we feel sincerity is a lot more important where religion is concerned. But then Christians in a church aren't saying, 'Look at me, I'm perfect!' Belonging to a church is really a way of telling the world: 'Look at me, I'm a failure. I can't live my life successfully with only my own resources. I hereby admit that I need God's help not to make a mess of my life.'
And so going to church is not a proclamation of virtue, but a confession of need. Hypocrisy isn't involved unless the person concerned is flaunting his church attendance as a badge of status; but the Bible makes it clear that God is not impressed with that sort of behaviour anyway (look at Jesus' story in Luke 18:9-14). Nobody was more scathing about religious hypocrites than Jesus himself.
Two other points you might like to think about. First, honesty about ourselves is something that we all have to learn slowly. It doesn't come naturally, but only as successive layers of illusion are stripped away from us bit by bit. We're all at various stages on the journey between hypocrisy and openness. People in churches are no different - except that Christians have Jesus to guide them gently in the direction of ever-increasing honesty.
And, second, it's easier harbouring grand illusions about yourself when you never expose your personality to contact with other people. Especially those people you wouldn't naturally want to have much to do with. But you learn a great deal about yourself in the cut and thrust of daily dealings with other human beings. And that is what belonging to a church plunges you into. So, judge for yourself - is it easier to be a hypocrite in a church, or in a bedsit?
What the church does is boring and outdated
Correction. What some churches do is boring and outdated. But you can't generalise. If you go to a steak bar and they serve you a piece of glamourized gristle which is totally inedible, that's sad, but you would be silly to avoid restaurants for the rest of your life. There are good places as well as bad.
Why do so many people who have never been inside a church for years have the firmly fixed idea that 'churches are boring'? One reason has got to be that churches have had a thoroughly bad press. The timid, unworldly, effeminate minister is a stock figure of fun in situation comedies. TV religons is often geared to the elderly and ultra-conservative. When a priest runs off with a choir member, it's instant news; but when the church does something genuinely creative and exciting, the papers rarely report it.
There is nothing 'boring and outdated' about Christian Rock Festivals, and Youth Alive and Christian Summits, Youth Group camps, Gospel Eisteffords, Beach missions, Café evangelisms (or whatever they call them!!!) and the new Christian Nightclub that opened recently, oh man, there's so many I can't even finish listing. Christians from all sorts of denominations take over a holiday camp and have fun while they worshi and learn together. Celebrations of Christian creativity in rock music, drama, dance, the visual arts, and every other medium conceivable. There is nothing 'boring and outdated' about how hundreds crowd together on a Sunday night for the most thrilling few hours of their week. At the other end of the scale, there was nothing more 'boring and outdated' about some tiny house church wher one or two Christians in an informal atmosphere have started to build a new Christian community together (for me anyway).
When thousands of evangelical Christians mass together in peaceful demonstration at barricades in the Phillipines, there is nothing 'boring and outdated' going on. When a handful of Chinese young people meet together in the forest early in the morning, so that they can worship God undisturbed, there's plenty of danger but little risk of boredom. Standing for Christ in Bosnia or Peru or North Africa is not easy, but rarely boring. Don't write off the church before youve explored the reality.
One reason that so many Westerners find the church 'boring' is that they have completely misunderstood what it is for. The church is not a celestial entertainment, a sacred cabaret that unfolds before you as you lounge in your pew. Viewed simply as a means of entertainment, it leaves a lot to be disired - that's true; bit the church is not a show put on for the benefit of its customers. It is the only society on earth which exists for the benefit of its non-members. It is a place where people can commit themselves together to hard work - to learning to live in love with one another, to sharing Christ's love with a hungry world, to offering nw life to broken men and women, to working for justice and freedom and equality for all humanity.
Demanding? Certainly. Entertaining? Not always. But boring? You must be joking.