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Beyond Churchianity - Trellis Magazine

Beyond Churchianity - Trellis Magazine

Section titled “Beyond Churchianity - Trellis Magazine”

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Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • So I accepted the idea that now I was “going to church” for the first time and eventually got very involved in the organized church. For a time I did go through some teenage rebellion, but after a while I came back to the church, and as a young man in my very early 20s, I decided I was going to make up for lost time and become the poster child of volunteerism in my church. I started singing on the worship team and teaching Sunday school. I was volunteering with the teens in the youth ministry. I was using all my vacation days from work to help out with VBS and short-term mission trips. I was basically there any time the doors were open and the lights were on. TM: Many young Christians have gone through a season of that. “Let’s see…am I working or doing my laundry right now? No? OK, I can go to church!” RJ: Exactly.
  • at no point did I feel used or like I was doing it out of guilt or obligation. I was very happily serving and invested in my church, and I had the good fortune of being in a church that had very little politics and dysfunction and drama. So what eventually led me out the door wasn’t like some of the stories you hear where there was abuse or tragedy or anything like that. I was very happily involved in church, and it was really a foregone conclusion that I would eventually end up on staff and become a pastor in the church.
  • The naïve part of that was I really didn’t expect that much to change. I was so familiar with the basic concepts of ministry. I’d heard them preached so many times from the pulpit and discussed so many times with other church leaders. I figured the basics were probably the basics. Sure there might be some little things on the periphery that needed to be addressed, but I was looking for a minor tune-up of my perspective…not full-on invasive surgery!
  • So I would take a verse to a church leader and say Help me, and they would give me a rationale because they were speaking from years of study through a lens of tradition that allowed them to reconcile these things.