(This feature is back by popular demand, ... well, actually by unpopular demand, ... well, truthfully, by no demand whatsoever, except perhaps my own.)
With more and more Christians leaving the institutional church to find Jesus, institutional church pastors are getting angrier and angrier about this trend, if one can perfectly encapsulate huge numbers of people becoming alive in Jesus and throwing off the shackles of something that is just as systematic as most of the world's other religions with the word trend, that is.
Fiery exhortations issue forth from the pulpits against this, but such rhetoric is the reason these congregants are leaving traditional churches in the first place.
These Christians, dones as they are sometimes called, are characterized as ships without captains, and other such eloquent sounding garbage. They are pictured as drifting through life, directionless, undedicated to their faith, and, one assumes, lacking in spiritual growth.
However, such thinking does not explain, and indeed is totally refuted by the fact that, when followers of Christ leave institutional churches, they frequently start studying the Bible mor frequently praying more often and having deeper fellowship with other believers.
Incidentally, you have to laugh as well at the characterization of those outside the institutional church as lone rangers, those who, when hard times come, have no brothers and sisters to turn to for comfort and sucre. As if you get much of that in most churches. More like:
Brother A: How ya doin, brother?
Brother B: Well, brother, my wife has been diagnosed with a serious illness, I just got fired and have no prospect of finding another job anytime soon, my teenagers' favourite hobbies are stealing cars and beating up old people, and I feel depressed, regretful and wonder why God ever created me in the first place.
Brother A: Well, nothing's too bad as long as you have Jesus.
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