OUR WORLD WITHOUT CHURCHES

To suggest doing away with Church, sounds ridiculous. Why it would be almost as bad as doing away with football. Anyway do not fear there is no chance of it happening. Yet the idea is interesting to play around with. And when I speak of doing away with Church and/or Churches I use the word church advisedly, in the church world view of its definition. By Church, I mean "a religious organization uniting in a single legal and administrative body with a number of local congregations". Also by Church, I mean a self-perpetuating institutional entity that determines and directs the spiritual welfare of its membership.  By Church, I do not mean Christian people considered collectively, but rather the Religious Institution that professing Christians pick and choose and join and support and preach and praise and promote and love.  Those Institutional Churches of this type come in a variety of names, forms and formats. They operate on nearly every street corner.

To do away with Churches of this sort would certainly have serious repercussions. It would be felt in a society with as many Churches as ours. The economic loss alone would be enormous. Thousands would be out looking for a job, most of them unsuited for anything except at speechmaking. A host of good work programs would go down the drain. The question of the moment, however, is not how much damage would the loss of Churches inflict upon society, but rather how much would it hurt true Christianity. What would the Christian faith lose if all institutional Churches disappeared? The first to go would naturally be the bona fide "Church Members", those whose religion consists mainly of being affiliated with a nice Church, those whose faith is purely Church-oriented not Christ-oriented, those whose loyalty is to their Church more than to Christ and His gospel message.  With no Church system to work for, to work in and on, these poor souls would be then utterly lost, satirically speaking. If they are now, only involved in Churchanity and not Christianity, they are lost without Christ anyway.

If Churches were removed from the scene what would remain? I presume just those people of God, called Christians, would be about it. If the Churches were suddenly gone off the face of the earth with all their Real Estate Holdings, Colleges, Publishing Houses, TV/Radio Stations, Creed Books, and all that rental property, we would have left the real ecclesia of God as we read about in the New Testament. Only what would remain would be the "called-out" people of God, the ecclesia of Christ. Things would suddenly become awfully simple. In each community there would be two kinds of folks, ones who follow Jesus and ones who don't.

A world without Churches! Whoever heard of such? To be perfectly frank everyone in New Testament times heard tell of the idea. For they lived in a world without Churches of the modern definition; and believe it or not they seemed to get along just fine with one another and with the Lord. Actually those early disciples turned the world upside down. We could do it again, I think, but first we have to get rid of the thing that keeps getting in the way. The professionally staffed, and highly organized, INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH SYSTEM! Its' Big, Big business, and it takes bushels of moola' just to keep the train on the track. We need a good dose of what those first century Christians took to get them motivated, me thinks it was love for lost souls, rather than love for "My Brand of Denominationalism is better than yours!"

Yours for Truth and Freedom.....Horace Hooper