Detoxing From Church

I have unsettling thoughts in my head. I'm wrestling with an overload of ideas and am not sure where to put all of them in order to bring some type of coherence to my thought life. My constant struggle is to differentiate between what I have grown accustomed to as church and what church really is. It's my desire to live as a part of a Christ-following community - surrendered to His leadership and allowing that to impact the culture all around me. However what I far too often find myself doing is living in a community shaped more by cultural baggage than by Christ. Maybe that's why the following words from The Off Ramp resonated so deeply with me.

"Imagine what you would have left after you remove from your life everything connected with the organizational church. I mean everything. I've discovered the hard way that living most of my adult life in cultural Christianity has formed my entire identity as a Christian. And when everything in my life connected with the church is gone, including sixteen years of professional ministry, I'm confronted with the true raw status my personal faith.
Now I'm going to say something harsh: In order to BE the Church, we need to leave the church. In other words, in order to truly become God's people as he intended, we must abandon our cultural version of organizational church. The application of this statement might vary, but it must happen. And as we abandon the church to become the Church, we will go through a detox period. Why such drastic measures? Involvement in an organizational consumer-driven church blinds us to the real state of our lives."

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