Those Last Days at the Church Quiet Ways

Jan 8 08   7:45pm

Jeri and I have been coming to Kirkridge for many years and here to Quiet Ways for the last 5 or 6. This old stone cottage has been such a place of refuge for us

Before this place we would stay in the old VanderBent house up the road. It was the same for us there.

We’ve been away from the church now for about a year. I say we because Jeri was head over heels into church…almost as much as me.

When we finally left the church we were both spent. No more to give. Appreciated by most…not by an important few. We were treated shabbily by that important few the last months of our time there. It was a paltry way to end my 38 years in ministry…a paltry way for Jeri to have to end her great years of voluntary service with MABC.

We have hardly stepped foot into a church of any kind since then.

Jeri still likes to stop in churches to offer prayers for people and I like to sit quietly in church when she does. But neither of us have been to a worship service. I can’t speak for her but I feel no need for corporate worship anymore.

In fact my beliefs have moved to a very different place now. I  still believe that spirituality is important but I have come to the point where I feel that organized religion is more superstition and authoritarianism than anything to do with spirituality and much less to do with love which is supposed to be at the heart of true religion.

How will all of his play out in me who has devoted much of my life to organized religion? I don’t know. And I feel more content, more at peace, more honest than maybe I ever have.

To be continued………………….