The Email Continues: Compass Bible Church is Not the Problem; Church is the Problem
Um, it’s been great corresponding with you, and thank you for your reply to my reply, but please let me lovingly challenge you on a few things. Your thinking is very indicative of present-day church attenders and my own for many years. So for the moment, let me include myself as a churchian. Everything is interpreted through a belief that the institutional church is the only game in town. Though we would deny it intellectually, we function as if we are progressively saved by church, and that is, in fact, stated Protestant orthodoxy.
So, what do we do? In order to condone staying in church, we make the church God’s only field, and we make the “red flags” the tares among the wheat. But trust me, the church is not God’s wheat field. Not even close. Compass Bible Church is not the problem, church is the problem. God’s family is a literal family, not a top-down authoritative institution. The phrase I just used is redundant because the essence of any institution is authority, and not the “body” illustration that describes Christ’s called out assembly. As a nurse aide presently perusing a medication certification, I have been awakened to the profundity of this illustration through the study of Physiology. There is no top-down authority in a body, a healthy body functions by mutual cooperation in accordance with each part fulfilling what it is created to perform. If the “head” makes good decisions, this edifies the living organisms of the body to fulfill their contributions to the overall health of the body. This is known as homeostasis. Different cells make up the body, and these cells are bodies in and of themselves with an intelligent mind of their own. The head cannot control these cells, but can only edify them (nourish them) through good decisions based on sound knowledge. It’s interdependence, not authority.
So God is “sovereign”? Very well, it is his sovereign choice for His body to operate in this way. And besides, doesn’t interdependence and edification reflect love and not authority? Authority circumvents the need for trust, edification, leadership, and interdependence. With authority, all of these are totally irrelevant. You merely do what the authority says to do; end of discussion, nothing else is needed. Hence, the sole purpose of the parishioner is to support the institution. Stop and think for a moment; is this not the pervasive mentality of church culture if you listen carefully to the primary themes in its sermons and songs? Furthermore, this is akin to the Platonist ideology that founded church to begin with circa 4th century. Why does present-day church look little like what we see in the book and Acts and the Gospels? Because its not the same thing. At times, I find the use of Scripture to supposedly articulate churchianity utterly ridiculous to the point of parody.
What you see at Compass is just their expression of the overall problem with church and its orthodoxy. Whether people want to call it “Calvinism,” “aggressive Calvinism,” “high controlling churches,” or whatever, it’s ALL, one, big, fat, lie.
Come out from among them and be separate. You are either with Christ, or the Pharisees.
paul
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
That compass is faulty.
Oh, Calvinism is the cult that is flying mostly under the radar for the moment, but it’s already wobbly, shaky, and not too long from now (let’s pray), the abominable thing is going to fall from the sky and explode.
What terrible evil.
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No matter how hard a Bible-believer tries to “fit in” at the institutional church, it always ends the same way. The gifts God gave you will only be used in that they can find a “slot” for it after the patterns of the world. Ex. teaching a class (now facilitating a workbook class these days), running some sort of outreach program copied after some nonprofit, knitting baby hats, etc. It’s absolutely absurd.
Also, when the brain doesn’t get the right nutrition, it will suffer from depression and poor decision-making. The way the institutions are structured, those ideas coming from “the bottom” are choked off and never taken seriously, or run through the deacon/elder approval process, thereby taking out the love and energy of the whole idea. If your body acted like this, death would soon follow. I think we are witnessing the institutional church having a stroke.
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Good analogy other than a dead body can’t have a stroke.
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Touche! A more accurate depiction would be doing a serious of organ transplants on a cadaver. Precious organs that would bring life to a living body that are sacrificed for a rotting corpse. Some might take this statement as being disgruntled, but it’s not. It’s something I’ve proven to myself to be true.
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“The way the institutions are structured, those ideas coming from “the bottom” are choked off and never taken seriously, or run through the deacon/elder approval process, thereby taking out the love and energy of the whole idea.”
These same people at the bottom are also usually the ones who have genuine need within that particular assembly: the family of 4 who has been foreclosed on and is about to be evicted; the grandmother who is having trouble affording medication; the abused wife who desperately needs a safe place to stay; and on and on. But whenever someone in leadership has some “pet project” suddenly there is plenty of money available. This is especially true with building projects. And ironically, it is those who are the most needy at the bottom who are expected to fund such nonsense, and just as ironically, they are the ones who are the most loving who genuinely feel some “duty” to give when they have no realistic means to do so. If that isn’t evil I don’t know what is!
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Andy and RM: The one’s at the bottom are the members of the body that Paul specifically talks about in 1Corinthians and elsewhere. And who are these at the bottom? Name any number of small organs in the body that we would be dead or incapacitated without. That’s Paul’s WHOLE point.
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RM, a stroke, or a sudden rigor mortis lapse (I have witnessed one of those). Knitting baby hats . . . whoop!
Blessings!
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I would like to include my “escape from church” anthem, Lauryn Hill’s aptly named, “Just Get Out”. .
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i have soooo many things to say about Compass Bible Church.
When I started there in 2017 I really liked it. I had gone to other reform congregations before. But man compass is just something else. The thing is rhair weekend messages are generally good except their stance on mental health issues is both false and pretentious. I liked the weekend sermons and decided to get more involved. This really unveiled what is really going on there which I’ll summarize in bullet point. I finally left very burned out, annoyed, and saddened due to what I saw in small group.
compass got weird, hypocritical, and horribly hard complementation.
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