What is Churchianity

Churchianity

If you really want to know how far the church has progressed in 2000 years, then just study Churchianity. What is Churchianity? In a nutshell it’s the story of how man decided to control Christianity and wrap all the meetings up in a tight and rigid formula that totally stifled the Holy Spirit and His plans in favour of man’s own plans. They called it religion.

In the interests of his new ‘religion’, man decided to preset the prayers, to limit the hymns and or music, to wrap everything up in costumes that got more and more fanciful as time went on. He decided that the Holy Spirit was obsolete and therefore un-necessary to guide their meetings as they now had a formula that everyone could follow.

To be absolutely fair, in the days of old, when very few could actually read or write, then keeping services to a set pattern may have had advantages. A set order of service would have enabled any late comer to know exactly where he was in the proceedings. Set prayers would have enabled everyone to remember them and join in where appropriate and there would have been other advantages too.

Having said that, by making a set service pattern, by making prayers set pieces, and by regulating the use of praise and worship the church that developed from about the 4^th century, when Rome adopted Christianity, must have been a very far cry from the 1^st Century church and ordinary worshippers would have lost any spontaneity. There would have been no freedom of worship, no freedom in prayer, and probably no ministry or healing either.

So religion’s own liturgy gradually took over the church services and, after about 1900 years people started to get bored with the same old same old. Yet gradually, brave ministers began to step out of the age old traditions a little bit and some freedoms began to be restored to worship if not to other parts of the services. The big breakthrough then came along shortly after the 1904 Welsh revival when we saw the birth, or rebirth of the Pentecostal churches that actually began Christianity back in the 1^st Century. This heralded a rise of spontaneous praise and worship, of extemporé prayer, and a return of ministry and healing. The Holy Spirit began to be first acknowledged, then freed to manifest in our meetings once again. Some main stream churches followed suit until, now, we have greater freedom than ever before in many of our meetings yet we still have a long way to go.

The trouble with Churchianity is that there can be no Holy Spirit in the works of religion and religion, at the bottom line, is what Churchianity really is. Religion still packs the pews of many churches today but, thank God, it is less than it used to be.

I long for, and pray for the day when religion is finally thrown out and true Christianity is given free rein to return completely to the 1^st Century Church standards of living, giving, caring, and sharing. In short, let’s get back to loving our neighbours as ourselves and fulfilling Jesus’ wishes for us in unity of purpose, worship, and community.

I look forward to a time when Christianity truly is once again all about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ which we share with anyone willing to hear.