"In a separate report, Barna found that more than 6 in 10 born-again Christians say they are customizing their faith, not following any one church's theology. 'Americans are increasingly comfortable picking and choosing what they deem to be helpful and accurate theological views and have become comfortable discarding the rest of the teachings in the Bible,' the report notes."
- "Christian faith: Calvinism is Back".
-----
In the last few years, I have picked up on a tendency of American Christians (including myself, to some extent) going into a church service with everything they believe already made up and then filtering everything they hear through that lens instead of through Scripture. There's this notion of "Joel Osteen is saying this; Paul Washer is saying that; they are both Christians, so they must both somehow be telling the truth... so I'll believe both of them." A lot of them don't read their Bibles enough to know the difference, and a lot of them do not "search the Scriptures to see if these things are so" like the Bereans did. And a lot of them don't examine themselves well enough to see whether they or their teachers are genuinely converted. (Note: God is the final arbiter of that, as the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked - Jeremiah 17:9. But: "you shall know them by their fruit" - Matthew 7:16.)
And then as they hear all these teachers saying all these different things, they cancel each other out. So when they do hear something about how their lifestyle habitually does not fall in line with Scripture and that if they don't repent, that is evidence that they may have never been saved, they dismiss it as, "Oh, that's just what John Piper thinks. That's nice. I'll just let him believe what he believes." Just as bad: "Oooo, that's convicting! But I don't need to do anything about it." It becomes like a college lecture on something that has nothing to do with your job: just interesting, just entertainment, just more useless knowledge in a brain that is most likely already full of worldly useless knowledge.
The problem is, God, not you, determines absolute truth. He alone sets the standards that determine whether you are really saved and whether you are growing in holiness. A lot of people mask their opinions with "God told me..." to get away with anything. But the Bible alone holds final authority regarding doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.
So I ask: where does your "customized faith" come from? Does it come from legitimate Biblical convictions obtained by reading and praying through Scripture? Or is it just what you want to believe?
It would be nigh upon impossible for me to pick a church that agrees with me 100% on every major and minor issue. I identify, in rapidly descending order of importance, as a Christian, a five-point Calvinist, a Baptist, and a qualified continuationist (in the vein of John Piper and Wayne Grudem). And I don't worship like a dead man. All of this, I arrived at through studying Scripture and listening to faithful preachers from Baptist, Presbyterian, nondenominational, Sovereign Grace, Acts 29, (etc.) churches.
Maybe you are from a Sovereign Grace church, read the preceding paragraph, and said, "I don't see what this guy's problem is. He should just join one of our churches. We agree with him on practically everything." The problem is the will of God.
After spending time in prayer about it and becoming convinced that God would be most glorified in my life right now if I do this, I became a member of a Reformed Baptist church in my area. (This is also the "international church" to which I referred in Godly Fellowship, Part 8.) We don't actually have "Reformed" or "Baptist" in our name. We have gone through three names and two pastors during the two-plus years that I have been there. The majority of the members who were there two years ago have left the church and been replaced by new people whom I do not know as well. And in my age group, our church is so full of young men that we all basically have to look outside our local church for prospective wives - and then make sure that they too agree with us on matters of the faith and can serve in our church - not an easy task. (In our young adult ministry recently, we had five men's small groups and only one for women.) There is really very little in it for me except that I know I am being fed with the Word here and worshiping God truthfully with other genuinely converted people here. And those two things outweigh everything else.
I do not want to make minor issues major, if I can help it in the least. To have fellowship with me as a Christian, someone must agree with me on one thing: the gospel. That is the most important thing in all of Christianity, and everything else in our faith is insignificant to this one thing: Christ died for sinners. And if someone repents of their sins (not just confessing them) and believes in Christ alone, God has given them that repentance and faith and saved them. Nothing else really matters compared to this gospel.
At this stage in life, loving the church means the following for me: "To the wind with 10- or 20-year Christian friendships that were not founded in Christ. Possibly, to the wind with getting married or even finding love, at least for now. I do not wear a cross around my neck. I carry it on my shoulder. And this is no sacrifice to me, because God killing His Son at Calvary was an unthinkable sacrifice, and He did it anyway to glorify His name by saving my soul from His eternal wrath. These are my brothers and sisters. They are with Christ. So I am with them."
When we approach doctrine or the church with apathy or we emphasize our customized theology above everything else, we ought to consider the following:
"You wonder why people choose fields away from the States when young people at home are drifting because no one wants to take time to listen to their problems. I’ll tell you why I left. Because those Stateside young people have every opportunity to study, hear, and understand the Word of God in their own language, and these Indians have no opportunity whatsoever. I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man. When there is that much ignorance over here and so much knowledge and opportunity over there, I have no question in my mind why God sent me here. Those whimpering Stateside young people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worst fates than these demon-fearing Indians, because having a Bible, they were bored with it – while these never heard of such a thing as writing."
- Jim Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty, p. 237, quoted on Pure Church.
