After Leaving Church: What’s Important Now?
The Church is Asking the Wrong Questions — Here is the One We Should be Asking
Leaving Church
I grew up attending church with my parents. We went every time there was a service, including Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, and the occasional revival meeting that would meet Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. I went to Christian schools and attended Christian camps and vacation Bible school in the summer. I was the go-to kid in Sunday school for questions, typically won the sword drills (looking up a verse in the Bible in the fastest time), and got to help with the puppet shows and flannelgraph. As an adult, I volunteered faithfully, led Bible studies, went to seminary, and served as a pastor for fourteen years. I guess you could say that I was all-in on the church.
Church was great for me as I was good at navigating church life and loved the routine. I knew the insider language and what was expected of me. It was great until it wasn’t. The church hadn’t changed, but I had, and it had become an obstacle in my journey. I found myself in an awkward place where my paycheck was tied to my faith, and my faith was not in line with my employer (the church).
After leaving the church, I found that I left a world where everyone cared what I believed and expected my stance on most matters to be the same as their stance. I entered a place where no one cared about my thoughts on baptism, salvation, sin, or the end times. It was incredibly freeing, lonely, and disorienting all at the same time. It was a season of questioning and doubting if I believed something because of my training or if I believed it for me. Now that I had left the church, I wanted a greater sense of what was important and where I wanted to focus.
Asking the Wrong Questions
Being raised in a Protestant Christian home, I believed the fundamental question of life was, “Are you saved?” This question would come up multiple times each week in church services, Bible studies, and watching Christian television. Others would ask,
- Are you saved?
- What will happen when you die?
- Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?
- Do you know where you will spend eternity?
- Are you covered in the blood of Jesus? (Really!?! No one thought this was a bad idea with disgusting imagery?)
The questions we ask are essential because questions reveal our beliefs and reinforce our priorities. For example, if I ask you how many people you hugged this week, it would indicate my value of embracing others and reinforce my expectation that you share hugs with those around you.
The same is true for faith and spirituality. The questions we ask reveal our focus and what we believe. The question “Are you saved?” was phrased in different ways, but the emphasis was always the same: If God and I are not good, and if I don’t get good with God, then the consequences are going to suck! The question reveals a belief that God is very dangerous, we should be afraid, and we should do everything we can to make sure we get the answer right.
But what if we are wrong about the premise that we are not good with God? What would happen to the questions about the afterlife? Would they still be the questions we needed to ask each other? Maybe there are better questions we should consider.
Why Did Jesus Die?
For Christians, their belief of why Jesus died is the reason behind these questions. There are different ideas about Jesus’ death and why he died, called “theories of atonement” in Christian theology. Each denomination or church is very ingrained or bought in on their chosen theory, and many no longer realize that their preferred approach is one of many ideas. You may have heard of some of them.
- Ransom theory — Jesus liberates humanity from slavery to sin and Satan and thus death by giving his own life as a ransom sacrifice. Jesus pays a debt to Satan for society.
- Christus Victor theory — Jesus defeats Satan in a spiritual battle and frees enslaved humanity by defeating its captor.
- Satisfaction or Penal Substitution theory — Humanity owes a debt, not to Satan, but God. Humans are subject to God’s wrath, and Jesus’ saving work substitutes himself in our place, bearing the curse for humans. Jesus pays a debt to God for humanity. (The dominant theory for Protestant Christianity in the last few hundred years)
- Scapegoat theory — The result of human rivalry and competition is the need for a scapegoat and sacrifice to reduce our anxiety and fear. Subversive in nature, Jesus allows himself to be the scapegoat, and his death exposes the evil present in rivalry, competition, killing, and sacrifice. The sacrificial system killed Jesus and thereby disclosed its bankruptcy and defeat. Jesus modeled a life of love and openness that overcomes all evil.
What if the dominant theory of satisfaction and substitution gets it wrong? What if we misunderstood why Jesus had to die? Could it be that Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity, but to change the mind of humanity about God?
Scapegoat theory indicates a pattern of human behavior where we fear being separate from others while we also compete with them to survive. This creates anxiety, and when the pressure gets too high in a group, someone influential picks an individual or group to bully, who is eventually excluded or killed. The anxiety subsides when the person is removed or destroyed. For many cultures, this evolved from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. The thinking was, “If killing someone makes us feel less anxious and more united, let’s do it regularly, and we can use animals to get the same outcome.”
In the Bible, we see this pattern of attempting to scapegoat the innocent (Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus) as well as the evolution to animal sacrifice. Hearing these stories from childhood, I thought the sacrifice system was normal and didn’t question the reason for the killing. I also skipped over the multiple passages where God rebukes this behavior.
"What are the multitude of your sacrifices to me?" says Yahweh. "I have had enough of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed animals. I don't delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of male goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required this at your hand, to trample my courts? …Wash yourselves. Make yourself clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do well. Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow." (Isaiah 1:10–17)
For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)
God does not want sacrifice or killing. God wants us to set aside hate and rivalry to live with mercy and love towards one another. Even Jesus echoed this multiple times: “But you go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’” (Matthew 12:7 & Matthew 9:13)
Instead of choosing rivalry, blame and competition, Jesus shows us that we can choose love, vulnerability, and openness. Jesus reveals that God is not full of wrath; we are! The reality is that we are already good with God as the Apostle Paul highlighted in his writings:
- all were justified to life (Romans 5:18)
- in Christ all will be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22)
- For all the fullness (of God) was pleased to dwell in him (Jesus), and through him to reconcile all things to himself by him, whether things on the earth or thing in the heavens (Colossians 1:15–20)
- I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness — the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:25–27)
- Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all (Colossians 3:11)
Even in the face of the horrific evil, love overcomes in the end. Jesus reveals himself as the representation of God: a God of humility, love, and compassion. Jesus did not die to appease an angry God, but to show us a different way to live and to show us the overwhelming love of God.
(Brian McLaren provides an excellent overview of Scapegoat theory in a sermon he gave at Sojourn Grace Collective on September 27, 2016. Brian’s part starts at the 5:00 minute mark in the audio.)
Asking Better Questions
If Jesus died to reveal a God that is entirely loving, all for us, and on our side, then what happens to our questions, “Are you saved?” or “Where will you go when you die?” If we have never been in jeopardy of God’s wrath, then we cannot be saved in the sense of being protected from eternal torture. The question, “Are you saved?”, becomes invalid and no longer makes sense. It is like asking, “How does the number 9 smell?” All of the questions related to eternity or being in the right relationship with God are bogus and unnecessary. We are good with God.
If our eternal future is secure and we no longer need to ask these questions, then what becomes the question we should be asking? The most important question must have something to do with the present moment. Jesus emphasized who we are, the life we live, and its impact on those around us.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” — Jesus (John 13:34–35)
The most important question becomes, “How will you live your life with great love?” We could ask this in different ways.
- How will you live your life with great love?
- Are you experiencing and revealing love at this moment?
- How are you treating those around you?
- How will you love well and add value to those around you and for all creation?
The focus becomes revealing who we are as sons and daughters of God by bringing God’s love, goodness, and grace into each experience. It is expressing the divine and manifesting the gifts and talents placed in us by God for others’ good. We stop asking, “What happens when you die?” and start asking, “How will you live?”.
The Next Thing in Love
I’ve decided if I had my life to live over again, I would not only climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. …I would not only go barefoot earlier in the spring and stay out later in the fall; but I would devote not one more minute to monitoring my spiritual growth. …What would I actually do if I had it to do all over again? …I would simply do the next thing in love. — Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God
We can learn a lot from those who are further on the journey as they reflect on their lives and how they lived. In his seventies and thinking of doing it over again, Brennan Manning says, “I would devote not one more minute to monitoring my spiritual growth. …I would simply do the next thing in love.” This is a powerful statement coming from a former priest.
An obsession with the afterlife and even with spiritual growth hinders the achievement of the real goal: loving well. If we stop focusing on who is ‘in with God’ and whether we are getting it right, we can do the next thing in love, revealing God in us. Let’s take the energy focused on eternal security and invest it in loving others, for love is the transformation we all seek.
So, as you go through your day,
- How will you live your life with great love?
- What would it look like to do the next thing in love?
- Right now, what does love require of you?
What’s After Church (whatsafterchurch.com) supports those reimagining their faith and engaging spirituality, especially after leaving the church or organized religion. Sign up for updates on new articles and resources. Also, receive a free download with registration. Get it here.
