The Black Church   The Yabba Doo   Lost In The Matrix   THE MATRIX 2.0   The Glass House   Church Administration   Bad Company   A House Divided   Fear of Canaan

Why The Black Church Looks Nothing Like Christ

The most egregious problem with today’s black church is its lack of love. Without love, we are powerless. Without love, we are in bondage. Pettiness is bondage. Childishness is bondage. Impatience, beloved, is bondage. If we had it—God’s love—it would show. There’d be some evidence in our lives of God’s peace, of His love for us. So much love that we’d want to share it. The dynamics of these places are so antithetical to the personal example of Jesus Christ that I can hardly qualify them as churches. Welcome to The Matrix. A place that seems real, that seems reasonable, but is in fact a lie.

To know Christ, to truly know Him, is to be homeless.

You may own a house, but that building is not your home. It is, at best, a distraction: an illusion and a pale imitation of the good things God has in store for us. Yet we invest more time and energy and money in that house than we do in our actual home—our eternal home with God. If you bought more house than you can afford, that, by definition, is bondage. It is an investment in a substitute reality wherein we govern ourselves the way the world does and we model our behavior after the accepted norms of this world, a condition we can rightfully compare to The Matrix.

The Matrix, for the three people who have not seen the blockbuster film trilogy, posits the notion that reality as we know it is actually a carefully constructed illusion designed to entertain our minds while artificial intelligence machines use our bodies as living batteries to power themselves. The Matrix church, by syllogistic argument, likewise creates a blasphemous, artificial environment which claims to be a Christian organism while embodying almost none of the qualities of Christ. The Matrix church, much like the Matrix in the movie, exists to leech money off its membership. It exists mainly to congratulate itself on existing.

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Let's take a look at some of our common practices and place them within biblical context in order to see how far the rabbit hole goes.    CONTINUED

The Black Church   The Yabba Doo   Lost In The Matrix   THE MATRIX 2.0   The Glass House   Church Administration   Bad Company   A House Divided   Fear of Canaan