It’s often difficult for people to resolve the bad stories they heard preached often when they leave unhealthy churches. Korah, the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath, Ananias and Sapphira, Hymenaeus and Philetus, Achan, Jezebel. These are the names that still ring in my ears nine years after leaving. They are individual stories that seem to show God as punishing and demanding (“kill them if they don’t obey”) BUT those don’t match the overarching themes of the Bible. Love does.
It’s scary to not take these stories as threats. We were taught that they showed a big part of who God was. But what can we do with them after leaving?
To me, the ones that stray from the central themes I consider more people’s perspectives or their own desires. They don’t change the central themes, but they show peoples’ struggle to understand, perhaps.
This may be a leap, but this helps me put all the other stories in perspective:
It’s kind of like the book of Job… there are people who quote Job’s comforters as “truth.” And yes, their statements are part of the story, but not the central theme. Their stories don’t give accurate information about God, even though they talk about God. They show something, but they’re not the part that shows God. Job’s part and God’s part show that. Not the comforters.’ It’s the same way with things throughout the Bible. It’s the Jesus part that shows God. The rest shows people trying to understand, some for better, others for worse, but none shows God like the Jesus part. The Jesus part says God is love.
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Author: Through Grace
I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12).
I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ.
1 John 4:7-8
7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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