The Religious Spirit is the Spirit of the Law, Part 1

Each new post now seems as though it might be the last in this blog--at least for the time being. Perhaps the church elder who said we have not done a very good job of raising awareness of the religious spirit in the Santa Maria valley was right after all. There are just 16 followers of the blog, although more than that read it from time to time. Our Facebook group, Sunrise Ministries, has 27 members, but several of them have only a curious interest in what we are doing. In any event, we have been faithful to our calling, and we are not quite done.

If memory serves, Colossians 2 has been referred to in these pages, but we did not get as far as verse 21 which reads, "Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle." That is one of those verses of scripture that make little sense out of context. Space does not permit us to do the exegetical teaching on the whole chapter which would take us into Chapter 3, so we are simply going to cut to the lesson and give a few examples of how we have seen this worked out in some local churches. We do recommend Colossians as a good read for those of you who might be interested. (Yes, that was written tongue in cheek.)

Over the course of the 23+ years we have lived in this valley on this tour, we have been part of five different churches for varying amounts of time.  At the first one we were, not so politely, shown the door. The last one we were more politely asked to not come back. The other three we left on mostly amicable terms. Recently, we have been attending a church outside the valley.

Those of you you know us might guess what churches these are, but do keep in mind you would only be making educated guesses. I have actually had to defend a church after I published an uncharitable comment and a person wrongly guessed which church it was. The intent has never been to detract from any church or ministry--only to point out the workings of the religious spirit in the valley. With that said, we can go on.

We were shown the door at a church because of a conflict over elders. We said variously that women cannot be elders, that elders do not judge prophecies, and that pastors do not choose elders who disagree with them. That last statement seems to be self-evident. The first two are found verbatim in scripture (1 Corinthians 14:29, Titus 1:5-6). The pastor and church council did not see it that way.

We were asked to not return to a church because this blog was "disturbing" to the pastor and elders of the church. This was also where one of the elders is the one mentioned in the first line of this post. That was seriously the primary reason given for their request although we were told the pastor was hurt by another writer's comment that was posted to this blog. In this case he correctly surmised the commenter was referring to him. Even then, it seemed we could have stayed had we agreed to take the whole blog off the internet. I wonder who (what spirit) could possibly have been behind that request? Maybe we actually did raise the awareness of the working of a religious spirit.

I was not told this would be a two-part post when I got up early to write it. I might have lobbied harder for more sleep. So much for this being the last post to the blog. Now I have add to the title and say, To be continued...