Building on a Faulty Foundation

1/3/2007

Do you come from a big church?

Oh, you mean before? Is 2,000 big? Yeah, been there.

What made you walk away from the big church?

Seeing a lot of bad fruit and a lot of lives being wrecked. There were a lot of things brushed under the rug and contradictions with the Bible. We’d try to talk about it and work it out, but there would just be excuses. We’ve all been told, “Try to work from within,” right? “Work from within, work from within.” From the time I was a new Christian that’s what I tried to do, but it seemed like the foundation was wrong in a lot of things.

When you try to build a house on a bad foundation, it might look good for a while, and then all of a sudden the doors don’t close anymore and the walls crack and everything shifts. That was probably my case. I knew too much and saw too much. I tried to reason and pray with people and tried to do whatever I could to work from within. That’s what I was told you’re supposed to do from the time I was a new Christian. But I never saw it turn.

When you build on a faulty foundation, you can’t fix the house later on. The foundation wasn’t obedience to God. The foundation was attending services, singing, and listening to a speech, but half the people there didn’t have a heart to obey God. They just wanted to do a culturally acceptable religious thing. “A little leaven leavens the whole batch.” You just can’t build on that. Eventually I had to do something different.

It was the same thing with me. In the denominational thing that I was a part of, it was impossible to solve problems. It’s not that I didn’t expect there to be problems. After all, we’re coming from being fallen humans to being transformed into the image of Jesus. That’s a long process. There are going to be problems, but I just want to be able to work on them and solve them. Where I was, there wasn’t a common ground or even a commitment to doing that. I too tried to work with that for a number of years and work with the leadership. But there was never even a consensus among them that they wanted to change anything, let alone any real idea of how to go about it.

•  Building on a Faulty Foundation