Man, can I relate to this sentiment. I’ve had a rocky relationship with a handful of churches. Several of my friends have been abused in a variety of ways by different ones – emotionally, relationally, spiritually. Physical abuse by churches is often plastered on the news.
Many (maybe even most) churches are broken. When we’ve felt betrayed by these places where we thought we were supposed to be safe, we deconstruct – we ask difficult questions about the people we let influence us, about the types of Christian belief they espoused, and about how we’re supposed to understand who God is after processing all this hurt.
“Deconstruction” has become a buzzword in Christian and former-Christian circles, and it often has a negative connotation associated with it, because the end result for a lot of people after deconstruction occurs is they leave the church and don’t come back.
But I maintain deconstruction in itself is healthy – every single one of us needs to ask probing questions about the communities we associate with because, even in the best communities, there are likely to be beliefs that are off (none of us are perfect).
However, as with anything in life, many of us start on the deconstruction roller coaster and take it to the extreme. I’ve especially noticed this in people who were once the most devoted to the church – folks who fall on the spectrum of being “sold out” to whatever thing it is they believe are more likely to move from being ardent supporters of a church to being ardently opposed to the church.
But I think it’s safe to say that the majority of people who end up leaving the church were not all that committed to begin with – which, to be fair, is the majority of people within churches overall: casual attenders.
The most popular move for folks who have left the church is to maintain that they still have a relationship with Jesus and with God, but they don’t see a need to be in a church.
But here’s the difficult truth all of us who claim to have a relationship with Jesus have to contend with: to have a real relationship with Jesus means to be submitted to Jesus as Lord.
Jesus doesn’t offer us the option of being our equal. To have a genuine relationship with Jesus is to realize he is Lord of my whole life – what he says, goes; what he commands, I must obey.
Jesus approaches people in the Gospels – and by the transitive property, he approaches all of us through the Gospels – as one with authority; it’s one of the many reasons people wanted to kill him. He offended those who were already in power and those who thought they knew God by contending that, actually, he had God’s authority and the right understanding of who God is.
And while Jesus himself only uses the word “church” (“ekklesia” in Greek) twice in the Gospels (Matthew 16:18, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”; and Matthew 18:15-17, “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If you are listened to, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If that person refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector”), he references it as if it’s a given that the church is the corporate body his disciples belong to.
And, indeed, Paul and John the Revelator both refer to the church as the Bride of Christ, which is a key to the final destiny of all creation: when Christ returns and all is made right in the world, it’s corporately as the church where our identity is primarily located; the church is the Bride of the Lamb.
Which makes sense in every single culture through human history except our own – Western individualism, it turns out, is our own invention. Community has been the essential locus of identity in every other human culture.
To be a follower of Jesus, therefore, it is requisite to belong to a community of fellow disciples.
And when I say “belong to a community,” I don’t mean show up to a worship service every now and then. No, this level of belonging means intentional discipleship – actively submitting our lives to Jesus and following his commands while lovingly keeping each of those in our community accountable to the demands of discipleship.
Jesus’ call is radical and all-consuming. It isn’t a spectator sport.
So by all means, hold the church accountable when it fails. If you’re part of a toxic congregation, leave. Don’t tolerate abuse. Take time away to heal if you need to.
But if you claim to follow Jesus, you have to find a family to which to belong. This isn’t optional – it’s part and parcel to submitting your will to Jesus’, to being a disciple.
Paul writes in Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” – notice that: Christ gave himself up for *the church*; not “for you,” but for “the church.”
If you hope to be with Christ in eternity, it’ll be as part of a group – part of the church. It’ll be hard to square that eternal reality with your experience here if you ignored, were indifferent, or rejected the very group with which you’ll have to belong.
David S. Wisener 
While I understand your point, I don’t agree. I came of age in the First Christian Church. It was my second home at one time. Along the way I discovered that most people are fake, shallow, and without merit. I don’t want to be a part of that, so if I am judged by God to be without merit myself to enter Heaven, then it will have to be. And I don’t say this lightly, as I want to be with my wife and God for eternity. If I go to church just to satisfy a requirement, then there is no point in going because I can get the same Biblical knowledge on my own. Once bitten, twice shy. Which is why a large group of people have the same view as I do. It is one of the few things we actually have in common. Eight billion souls on this Earth, and eight billion different views on God.
I’m incredibly sorry that your experience with the church has been so painful and disappointing. It’s unfortunately very common as there are a lot of shallow and fake people in the world – we would hope church would be different, but as it’s filled with broken people like anywhere else, it’s often sadly not.
My point wasn’t that belonging to a church satisfies something like a requirement, but rather that God calls us to community. We aren’t called to knowledge, but rather to a way of life, which is the path of the cross, death to self. We owe Christ our allegiance and obedience (“If you love me, you’ll obey my commands,” John 14:15), and his desire for us is to be in community with one another – the family that is the church is the community that is supposed to be his body (his hands and feet) in the world, and it’s through his body that we have our identity and are saved.
So the heart of what belonging to a church is about is obedience to Christ and identifying with the body he has established as his continued presence in the world until he returns. That doesn’t make it easy (nor should we expect it to – picking up our cross and following him isn’t exactly a picture of ease!), but if we want to be a disciple, it means we follow.
I hope you have a blessed and happy Easter!
Thank you for replying. I would like to add two things.
Without going into too much detail, the church that I previously mentioned was a huge part of our (my mother and myself) lives. My great-great-grandfather was the first full time pastor there after the church building had been dedicated at the turn of the 20th century. My mother taught children’s Sunday School, and I was a junior deacon.
This particular church has had internal strive for decades. In the 1950’s, it split from divisive political issues. It split again in the 1990’s for yet again divisive political issues, though not the same ones. And now it is barely hanging on, with such a beautiful building built to honor God being mostly empty. It makes us, my wife and I, very sad.
With that in mind we read in Matthew 18:20 – “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
My wife and I therefore comprise our own church, which is where we are happiest.