Even though I started rejecting the formalized church institution, I kept growing as a person and paid off more of my childhood emotional debts.
I came to believe that most of the Church’s answers were generic-brand repackaging of what the rest of the world already did in other domains.
While I had been writing essay-guides starting in 2014, I started making spiritually-focused essays around late 2016. I received a relatively ambivalent reception from the Christians I shared my ideas with.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemonium, almost every church decided to honor a politicized command over any spiritually-motivated directive:
- All large-scale venues were instructed to shut down without any provocation or justification, with meetings of no more than 20 people.
- Restaurants adapted better than the church did with app-based delivery services.
- Most service workers generally kept going by requiring customers/clients to wait in their car or perform at least some work over the phone or internet.
- However, the churches never moved from the venue-based model, and most of them simply shuttered their doors for months.
I was utterly disgusted and despairing over that experience, and it congealed a few things for me.
- I was convinced the American Church was fast asleep, and I was a traumatized victim of their spiritual neglect.
- In my anger I shook the dust off my feet from the entire Western Church, and came to the conclusion they were a waste of time unless God directly sent the right church across my path.
- I made a personal commitment to find answers and write essays about everything that was going on, which I saw as back-end yak shaving over “What Is” to empower God’s “What Ought To Be”.
My sin was in my impatience. God works quietly and peaceably, hoping nobody will perish, and I saw my way as being a more expedient approach.
In the midst of this, I was frustrated at the incessant escapism from by Rapture theology, so I sought to more intimately understand the political system He wanted for us. I realized Revelation 20 had at least a partially literalist interpretation, so I produced a summary of what Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom would look like.
With my bitterness, this creative foray drove me to severe depression through added understanding:
- Irrespective of my accuracy about the Millennium, I came to understand at least some minutiae of the upcoming sociopolitical society under Jesus’ command.
- In that studying, I also read the Acts of the Apostles and several historical records about the early Church, which showed that same loving society on a smaller scale.
- I looked at the society we live in now, especially within my church experience, and saw nothing close to the Bible in it.
I became homesick for a lifestyle and nationality I hadn’t attained, mixed with contempt for the Church. I imagined the Church had failed abysmally for nearly 2,000 years.
I was crestfallen from the cowardice and complicit obedience of people locking themselves in their home over a fear of a disease that killed fewer people than car accidents or gluttony.
- Why obsess about 70 years being cut to 40 if you’ll live afterward without bodily pain?
- What happened to “pick up your shameful death object and follow me”?
- Where was the Church leadership in all of this?
I felt I had to take action, so I attempted multiple things, which all failed. By this point, I had built out philosophical explanations of just about everything, so I imagined I simply had to convert the ideas into feasible solutions and watch God make it happen.
I started trying to design a social network to update the Church to the modern era, a bit like Gab but with more features to accommodate the needs of any church. Most church websites have been stuck in the GeoCities era of UX development (with a static website as a billboard for in-person services), and my natural gifting in computers would have lent well to it.
I also had been incubating ideas toward working in a parachurch organization, making a not-for-profit organization, and quite a few other odds and ends.
What I didn’t see was that I had presumed God’s will within my own understanding, and was marching forward on that basis.
This all changed when God permitted more of the unknown to come knocking.