Why Are Churches Destroying Themselves

                If Christianity has anything to do with God, Love towards Him is the foundation of holy life. Christians usually mention faith as a number one value, but faith in Christian sense is really a disguised love, because faith is not so much about believing in God as it's about trusting Him and feeling affection towards Him. You can believe in God but without love you will get nowhere. You can love God and everything else will fall to its place.

                Now let me take an example. Imagine you have a club of men which want to be devoted to their wives. They gather once a week and they encourage each other to be better husbands. When one of them has a crisis, the club has a role to help him back on his feet. This sounds a bit strange, but not so bad as you would agree. An idea of a little organisation helping you in your marriage is an interesting idea to consider.

                But on the other hand, let's say that all your friends are members of this club. Let's say that some of you get a living from working in this club. And finally, let's say that if others find out that you have problems in your marriage, they will start looking at you as a less worthy member of this club, and if your marriage falls apart, you will get excluded. Now that would be horrible.

                So your situation is this. You are a member of this club for ages, your best friends are there, your paycheck comes from the club and now your marriage is falling apart. What will you do? How big temptation for you it will be to start lying to others about your marriage? How convenient it would be for you to stay in this marriage only because of what you lose as a former member? How easy it would be to lie to yourself that you still love your wife and that everything is alright while both of you are being destroyed by this rotten marriage? It would be too easy. Maybe even the smallest problems would be ignored because of the fear of being expelled from the club. After all, everything you have depends on it.

               This is the problem with churches. Churches think that they can sanction, and punish, and get out warnings, and straighten out relationships with God of its believers. Churches think that they can boost love with measures. But the fact is, you can't boost love of somebody else! You can give advice, you can encourage them, but you can't make someone love somebody else. It's impossible! And when you start punishing the person which falls out of love with someone, you will do a lot of damage.

               When I started to have enormous spiritual dilemmas, I was still a pastor. All my friends were tied to my church, my paycheck was coming from the same church, my apartment belonged to this church, and I was in a set of circumstances that made it almost impossible to be honest to yourself and admit that you have problems. And when I look at other members of my church(which is set up as most of the churches), I see that others are afraid of admitting they have problems too.

                Every church that I know puts a huge weight on your back and makes it impossible to have a relationship with God, because in every health relationship you need to be allowed to struggle! And this is where the churches are suffocating any attempt of spiritual life.