Losing Your Religion: Moving from Superficial Routine to Authentic Faith

North

Introduction

This book is not about pointing fingers at other people (and especially the Church); it’s about each of us looking in the mirror at ourselves, individually. Despite my best efforts to keep that point clear, as you read, you may get confused about this. So I thought I would mention the true focus at the start.

C. S. Lewis once said, Show me a man that is well traveled and I will show you a man that knows the lies of his own village.

I’ve found this to be true as I’ve traveled to 26 countries. The differences in how people think about life in other cultures can be revealing. Learning about these differences can serve to open our eyes to the flaws in our own thinking and approaches to life.

I’m hoping this book will serve as a mirror to reflect aspects of our church sub-culture that are off-base. When I say that, I’m not speaking of other people; I’m speaking about each of us as individuals. We each make up the sub-culture we live in.

I have a growing concern that more and more people who call themselves Christians are unintentionally slitting the wrist of their faith. In a pursuit to be faithful, they try to will themselves into embracing habits and routines and disciplines they believe will cause them to be a better Christian. Although this seems like the right thing to do and seems to be the norm for our culture, it’s actually suicidal.

It is this concern that leads me to write this book. I think people are dying to be made alive again in their faith. I know countless people who long to be freed from the religious chains that bind them, yet they cannot seem to put their finger on what chain is actually around their neck.

I’m not claiming to have unleashed any sort of secret formula to the Christian life; nor am I claiming to have all the answers. But one thing I do know: Far too many people think Christianity is simply about agreeing with a certain set of doctrinal points and modifying their behavior or managing their sin to be a better person.

I claim this idea and thinking as fraudulent. It might not be how we talk about Christianity, but it’s certainly how we practice it. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the faith Jesus invites us to live—and I think deep down we know it. I think people feel the weight of shame and guilt of this system of doing church. I know there are many Christians in the world today who don’t feel quite right about their faith and, I would say, with good reason.

To that end, I would like to help you identify and distinguish the faith, love and hope Jesus calls us to live by from the behavior-management system we too often refer to as Christianity.

To begin, I want to ask for grace. I write with some very strong language at times—especially in the first section—and I did that to promote deeper thought about how you think about the Christian life. This book will require some introspection on your part. It’s not that what I write is so deep as much as it is hard to see inside yourself. But I believe that if you try to recognize these things in your life, it doesn’t take long to see their manifestation.

This book begins by deconstructing some of the core of how we go about being the church. In Part I, I’m not looking at the institution side of things. I’m talking about each of us individually. There are times when deconstruction is necessary for building a new foundation, and I would suggest that most of us, if not all of us, need to deconstruct some of the ways we think about our faith.

The next four chapters (Part II) are about how you can develop new foundations of thinking that will affect how you live your faith. If the first section is about pinpointing some of the ways we get off track (which is a vital part of this process), then this section is about pointing us in the right direction. It’s about embracing an entirely different worldview from your current one, which is partly why I wouldn’t necessarily call this book a fun read. Using the term paradigm shift may even be too tame to really get to what I’m talking about. I believe we all need to recalibrate how we live as Christians, and this begins with changing the ways in which we view Christianity as a whole. My desire for this section is to get to the core of Jesus’ desire for us. It’s about the premises we ought to be operating from as Christians in comparison to what tends to drive us.

The third and final section of this book is about setting guardrails that will assist you to walk through life on your new foundation. My desire in this section is to help all of us in a practical way to realize when we’ve gone too far, and I do that by drawing a lot of distinctions. I share about how we can know when we’ve moved from personal convictions to the dangerous and ugly world of religious legalism. Personal conviction and religious legalism could not be more different, but they are very easy to confuse with one another.

I’ve also included a chapter that distinguishes healthy faith rhythms from superficial religious routines—a balance few Christians have seemed to have found. I will then close the book with an encouragement to sink your teeth into the generous lifestyle of Jesus. Generosity is more easily admired than embraced, but that’s sort of my point.

I pray that this book will be a useful tool to help you take a few steps closer to experiencing the faith, love and hope in which God has designed you to live.

Chuck Bomar

Part I

Necessary Deconstruction

1

Unrecognized Chains

It’s said that Christianity is not a religion, but it’s about having a relationship with God.

I believe this to be true. Wholeheartedly.

However, my experience is that this tends to be more a figure of speech than anything else for most people. I would say that many people, like me at one point, have simply embraced a religiously charged behavior-management system they just happen to call Christianity.

But this often goes unrecognized.

Behavior-centered ideas about Christianity offer zero hope to those looking for it. Love is not the motivator for relationship with one another or with God. And what the Bible calls faith is barely present in practical ways.

But as big of a problem as this is, I think the real problem lies in the fact that most of us don’t affiliate ourselves with those feelings or environments.

I came to faith my freshman year in college, but I know that, from very early in life, kids who grow up in church learn about Christianity. This can be a fantastic thing, but I’ve found they usually learn little more than what people have deemed as proper behaviors for Christians. I don’t believe this to be an ill motive of anyone nor do I necessarily think anyone is to be specifically blamed. I actually think people have the best of intentions, and most have a deep love for the children they teach.

But whether we realize it or not, our view of the Christian life has been wrongly narrowed to managing behavior rather than experiencing the life-giving hope we have in Jesus. And since we all carry this mentality at some level or another, the sub-culture of our churches ends up being centered on this behavior management.

Most kids understand Christianity as doing things like these behaviors:

Obey your parents

Go to church

Don’t lie

Read your Bible

Pray with your head bowed and eyes closed . . . and hats off

Don’t cuss

Make sure you choose good friends

Invite your friends to church, but don’t talk to them while someone else is talking

Get baptized

All of these behaviors can be good to learn and do, but things get really dangerous when kids learn them as the ultimate thing they need to do. This creates a religion God never intended. I usually refer to this as Churchianity, and I believe this is precisely what happens in far too many church contexts.

Behavior-management religion is highly deceptive and eternally dangerous. And most of us have fallen into its grasp at much deeper levels than we realize.

If you were involved in church during your middle school or high school years, the proper behavior list likely got longer with more necessary do’s and don’ts if you wanted to be a good Christian.

Don’t have sex before marriage

Don’t do drugs

Don’t drink alcohol

Don’t get up to pee while the leader is talking

(And if you really want to be faithful) make sure you do a quiet time every day and memorize Scripture

In other words, Christianity became little more than upholding these types of do’s and don’ts. These types of things are taught as the marks of a good Christian, and most of us have believed it hook, line and sinker.

Then, as adults, we pile on all the spiritual disciplines as other habits and behaviors we are supposed to embrace.

Again, most of these are great things to learn. But setting these up as the standards of maturity for Christians is where things get very, very confusing. And even deceptive. Rather than viewing proper behavior and spiritual disciplines as byproducts of faith, we learn them as creators of it. Instead of recognizing that the behaviors that will truly honor God come from an inward desire to please Him, we have made them to be the means to please Him. We will unpack those distinctions in the second section.

For now, I will just say my concern is that more and more people are not able to make these distinctions in their own lives. And it is this concern that leads me to write such a straightforward book. My tone will change a bit in the second section; but in this first section, I feel as though it’s necessary to just put thoughts out there.

Is It Faith or Behavior Modification?

If you fail to clearly and practically distinguish some things in your mind, you are in grave danger. Confusing behavior management with the life Jesus invites you into will murder the faith you long for and bury it in the abandoned field of religion.

That’s a harsh reality every one of us must embrace at a very practical level.

This religious system we have set up paralyzes in so many ways. This behavior-management religion is most often masked as a grace and hope-filled connection with God, but it’s precisely the opposite. It binds, and the scariest thing is that most of us don’t realize how much we have exchanged the hopeful, loving faith God invites us into for this system.

That’s exactly what I want you to consider.

In this book, I will try to make distinctions that can help you move away from religious behavior management and step toward experiencing the life-giving personal relationship with God we all talk about having.

For instance, I want to walk you through how we often . . .

turn personal conviction into awkward religious legalism;

confuse superficial routines motivated by guilt for true Christianity;

allow our behavior-management idea of following Jesus to be expressed in condemnation toward other people who sin differently than we do

manipulate standing up for Truth into fighting for our own moral standards

twist faithful obedience into behavior for the purpose of gaining God’s favor.

We must properly align these types of differences in our minds; but before we dive too much deeper, I want to make a few things clear:

I don’t think religion is necessarily a bad thing.

I don’t believe religious institutions are a negative in God’s eyes. Jesus never bashed them.

I believe that embracing good habits can be a wonderful part of a vibrant faith.

I believe that setting up routines have proven to be fruitful for many believers.

I believe that pursuing godly conduct is a must.

Okay, now, having said those things, I would love for you to be open to the possibility that the chains of religion are holding you back much more than you might know.

Like me, the truth is that you have likely been taught and have even created behavioral pet peeves that you have mistaken for biblical Christianity. And perhaps the most dangerous aspect is that it all gets passed on as being Christian.

We can either be ignorant of or in denial of these things. But we are all guilty, at some level.

Coming face-to-face with this reality in your life could prove to be a brutal experience—especially the next two chapters. You might literally realize that what you thought of as being Christian is nothing more than . . . well, the very things you say you’re against. But I believe that bringing some of these realities to the surface is the start of being set free from the chains of religion that (often) unconsciously bind us. And that’s what I get excited about!

The other day I heard a parent tell her child, No, no, honey, Christians don’t do that.

I’m sure this mother loves her child deeply, but what do you think the child learned about Christianity in that moment?

Parents must begin asking the question, What am I actually teaching my children Christianity is and is not about? And we all must begin asking, What have I personally embraced Christianity to be?

I believe it shows in what we teach others.

I believe the truth lies dormant beneath the fears that control us.

If we’re honest, we have embraced Christianity as Law much more than a New Covenant faith infused with Jesus. We’ve embraced a system of do’s and don’ts much more than a life motivated by faith, love and