I wrestled a lot with the term “big” but I’ll stick by it. “true” usually gets people into “correct”, Yhwh vs. Baal or Buddha and stuff like that and that isn’t where I wanted to go. The idolatry of religion is much deeper than consumer selection of a deity.

It runs along the lines of a post I made on voices previously about church losing focus. I often keep longer posts I write on my blog: http://leadingchurch.com/wordpress/?p=890

A number of years ago a light went on for me when on my trip to Redeemer in NYC Tim Keller made the comment that what churches tend to do is demand that their people spend more and more time in the church AS institution. More Bible studies, more prayer groups, more leadership meetings, more, more more. I immediately saw that he was right.

Churches, denominations, ministries, all want to grow. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily but I think a lot of it for us is cancerous. It’s the kind of growth that Sauron wants to do in the Lord of the Rings. It isn’t the kind of generous, humble growth that we see in Jesus and the creator God. For the church it is the cancerous growth of the religious aspect. It is a religious totalitarianism and we have cast God as the tyrant. Part of the rebellion we find among angry ex-Christians is due to this totalitarianism. It is important to note that the first thing Adam and Eve DIDN’T do in the garden was to build a temple, the garden WAS the temple. In the New Jerusalem there isn’t a temple, the new heaven and earth ARE the temple. In fact the tabernacle and temple were intended to be micro-cosmos.

I also used the word “Big” in hopes that people would hear an echo of the “Big government” complaint. Even though in this group I’m not on the conservative political wing one of the things conservatives have right is the recognition that governments too can become idolatrous.  The irony is that some who complain about “Big government” don’t seem to have the same scruples about “Big Religion”.

“Big religion” is one way of understanding the error of those Jesus used his most violent words with. Religion got so big it overshadowed that which the law was given to value and preserve. Big religion usually leads to religious tyrants who leverage their religious positions to dominate the other legitimate aspects of God ordained culture making. Christendom has tended to suffer from this. I think Kuyper’s notion of sphere sovereignty pursues this. Church as institution just tended to smell too much like tyranny.

Now human beings all of who are rebellions by nature can have a knee jerk reaction to tyranny and a tendency to confuse even legitimate, life giving authority as tyranny tend to switch between tyranny and anarchy depending upon which serves their immediate agenda. There’s plenty of that in the cries of the post-Christian rebels too, but those reactions tend to need to be addressed from the inside out. What we in the institutional church have to watch is our tendency to abuse and manipulate what has been entrusted to us. pvk