Over the course of the last five years or so, my wife and I have essentially “run the gamut” of “popular” Christianity.  There have been amazing ups and horrendously difficult downs.  We have seen the sick healed, demons cast out, decades of torment destroyed, and lives transformed as they encountered the Living God who dwells within us.

We also have seen an almost incredible amount of hypocrisy, powerlessness, bad doctrine, control, manipulation, intimidation, merchandising of the Gospel, and untold numbers of people who have been too enslaved by fear of change to embrace the goodness of God and move forward into a life of victory and power that exalts Jesus.

I would like to share some more personal elements of our journey as well as some insights that I believe God has revealed to us throughout this process of learning who He is for how to demonstrate His idea of “church” in the best way that we know how so far.

A true disciple should look like their teacher (Luke 6:40).  This has all been an amazing adventure of discovering the King and His Kingdom through encounters with His people who are His temple (1 Cor. 6:19).

This will be a series of articles, due simply to the fact that there is a lot to tell and I know I will not be able to get it all out in one sitting.

Enjoy.

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2007 – Syracuse

When I first lived in Syracuse, NY, the first ‘church’ that I attended met in a quite sizable Assemblies of God building–although from what I was told a few months into my attending, there were far fewer members attending there at that time than there used to be.  It was there that I first began to really hunger for the things of God and it started my search for authentic Christian community and relationships.

I met a handful of people — only a small handful — that I really was able to actually call my friends and look to for any type of guidance and cultivating relationships that weren’t only Sunday-morning-surface level.

It was also there and with those friends that I began attending my first ‘home group’ meetings which usually took place on Friday nights.  These meetings were small and they were very personal — we shared things among each other and were transparent in a way that I had never encountered before — especially not in the ‘church’ that I grew up attending as a child.  It was one thing that I looked forward to every single week — because the relationships and the life that we lived with each other there was so real.

It was here that I first experienced what I believe to be authentic Christian community life.  We often ate together, had tea or coffee, and shared about things God was revealing to us in our own studies of the Scriptures.  We would worship together and pray for each other’s needs.  It was very real, intimate, and encouraging.  We had a lot of fun with each other.

At this time, I also began getting heavily involved with the youth and young adults group at this Assemblies of God church.  I had a passion to see young people embrace a lifestyle of Kingdom-living (even though at the time, I had no idea what “Kingdom-living” even was or how to do it) and so I did what everyone was telling me to do — I approached some of the pastors and told them that I had a vision to see young people run after God.

I didn’t know the youth pastor at the time and I was very excited and completely ignorant of the way “the church system” was run.

I figured everyone was just like me — passionate, “on fire”, and excited to learn more about Jesus and how to live like Him.  There was a child-like innocence to all of it — but with that came a vulnerability that the enemy definitely exploited.

I was completely naive about the fact that the devil seems to have no problem setting up shop in the lives of people who profess Christ.  I was entirely clueless of the destructive nature of the ‘pyramid structure’ of most churches today.  More than all of this, I was entirely bereft of the knowledge that there could be any type of bad, controlling doctrine in the minds of well-intentioned Christians that was about to imprison me for years to come.

When I first told the youth pastor that I wanted to help out on the leadership team (as I was several years older than most of those in the youth group), I was quickly met with a type of hesitation that I would become all-too-familiar with as the years went on.  It was certainly not any bad intentions on his part — but I remember seeing in his eyes a kind of suspicion that surprised me.  I would later come to realize that the reason for this suspicion was simply because of how much nonsense goes on in churches worldwide.

I was essentially told that in order to become part of any type of leadership at that church, that I would have to be “under cover” or “under someone’s authority”. I was handed a copy of John Bevere’s book about being “protected” under a “spiritual covering” and was instructed to read the book and then get back to them.

And so read I did.  I remember feeling a bit confused as there were a lot of stories used in the book to try and validate the position of having to be “under cover” to stay spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and sometimes even physically safe in ministry.  I also remember not understanding how this fit in with all of the promises of protection in the Scriptures for those who are believers in Jesus Christ.

But I blindly trusted those who were leading me and assumed that they knew better than I did because they were Christians longer than I was.

And thus I subjected myself to one of the most destructive and paralyzing mindsets that has perpetuated throughout the body of Christ today: that in order for anyone to be truly successful and yes, even “safe” in their lives as a believer, that they must “submit” themselves to another individual that is “over” them in ministry.

That is one hundred percent a lie and goes against everything that the New Testament teaches.  All throughout the New Testament we are encouraged to “submit to one another in love” — and yes, there are a few passages about “submission to leadership” but it was never meant to be a hierarchical, top-down-pyramid type of thing where the pastors call all the shots and nobody is allowed to ask any questions without fear of being excommunicated.

Jesus was clear about this:

“Jesus said, “You’ve observed how godless rulers throw their weight around, how quickly a little power goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave. That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for the many who are held hostage.” – Matthew 20:25-28 (The Message)

The New Testament teaches very strongly that a believer’s faith in Christ and the fact that our Heavenly Father loves us unconditionally is what keeps and protects us.

For more on uncovering the “covering” doctrine, check out this article.

I had thus begun a long, drawn-out process of chasing the perpetual carrot-on-a-stick of ‘church membership’ and ‘submission to spiritual authority’.  I quickly found myself engaged in a lot of what seemed to be more likeinterrogation and indoctrination sessions rather than Bible studies that would help me live a powerful life as a representative of Christ on this earth.

After months of this type of perpetual jumping-through-hoops-facade that I was engaged in, I began growing weary.  I very much enjoyed the fellowship and community that was going on with the small home group, but I found myself increasingly becoming disenfranchised with the “system” that seemed to be more about “playing it safe” than living an exciting, faith-filled lifestyle of adventure that I so often read about in the Scriptures.

I grew more and more tired of just “going to church” and started asking a lot of hard, intense questions that nobody seemed to be able or willing to address:

• “Why does Jesus say that His followers will heal the sick and set captives free and I see none of this in my own life, let alone the fact that I don’t see it in the lives of the rest of the Christians around me?”
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• “What really happened when I got born again?  Was it just a ‘get-out-of-hell-free’ card like so many of the messages that I heard preached from the pulpits…and the rest of our Christian lives were just kind of a ‘hang-on-til’-Jesus-comes-back’ kind of thing?”
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• “How am I supposed to learn to love like Jesus and demonstrate who He is if I’m not even allowed to talk to certain people in the church without being ‘under cover’ ?”
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• “And most of all…did Jesus really die and send us into the world just so that we could erect a giant building to huddle in and sing some nice songs and pass an offering bucket every Sunday morning?”

The question that burned within me really boiled down to:

“Isn’t there MORE than THIS?”

There were a few very intense months where I grew increasingly frustrated with the apathy and hypocrisy that I started seeing in the church.  There were a small handful of the youth who seemed to have the same kind of passion that I did, but because they didn’t have the same kind of freedom to express themselves (due to living with their parents, school obligations, etc.), that fire was quickly squandered.

I noticed over a period of time that what seemed to be living and thriving in the small home group — which was simply a gathering of a handful of people who loved Jesus and wanted to know Him more — seemed to simply not work in the large, performance-like setting on Sunday mornings and Thursday nights.

Shortly before I completed all of the “membership classes” and such that were required of me before I was “released into ministry” at the church in Syracuse, I read a book by Bill Johnson called “The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind”.

That changed everything.

It gave me language for the questions I had about the lack of demonstrations of power in the church today.  It opened my eyes to the fact that there are indeed people on the planet who believed Jesus’ words in John 14:12 — that those who came after Him would do the same things He did and even greater.  The context of that passage was indeed talking about operating in the miraculous.

It was almost overnight that my mind came alive with the revelation of 1 Cor. 4:20 — that the Kingdom of God is not simply a matter of talk — but that it is in demonstrations of the power of God.

It wasn’t long after this point that a pretty big wrench was thrown into my plans for life and ministry.  I never did end up fulfilling the role of a youth leader that I was pursuing.  It seemed that God had other plans for me. It was either that or He knew that with what I was pursuing, that I needed to be protected from being hurt and misunderstood to an even greater degree for my zeal for seeing people set free from oppression.

I’ll never forget the first time a church leader told me that I was spending too much time focusing on learning about how to see people set free through faith in Christ.  I was actually discouraged from praying for the sick and told that it was not always God’s will to heal (even though I saw clearly in the life of Christ and my reading of the Scriptures that He always healed the sick).

Friends, it was absolutely devastating for me to hear that from a leader that I respected. It brought such a confusion and frustration into my mind that I can’t even begin to explain to you the turmoil that simple statement of bad doctrine caused me for months and months to come.

Shortly after that happened, my company ended up down-sizing and I received a promotion — but for me to accept it, I had to drop everything and move to Rutherford, New Jersey.  It was a very hard time for me, as our home-group on Friday nights was what really was making me come alive and had become quite exciting for me.  It was a sad thing to have to walk away from people that I truly cared about and who had helped me begin the journey of discovering my identity in Christ.

However, there was nowhere else to go but forward.

In part two, I will talk about the next stage of our journey.  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out Wayne Jacobsen’s book “So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore?”

You can download a free copy at JakeColsen.com or purchase the book below.