Thanks to YouTube, I often listen to sermons from churches and ministries in my area.

It was striking to me how different each church is in their message and means of serving and understanding God.

One common practice that I noticed was in the first few weeks of this year pastors felt compelled (or pressured) to review the ‘vision’ of their particular church.  They review what they have done and sometimes give plans or general principles for everyone to rally around. This is a common leadership principle for any leader of a group.

During one recent vision-casting service a pastor said ‘church is like going to the ice cream shop, if you don’t like vanilla go elsewhere for chocolate.‘  In other words each church has a different vision find one you like, join in and serve.

If we zoom out a little from our own local circle and look at the general unity of the body of Christ as a whole in every town and state and every country it doesn’t take long to see deep disunity of vision, a deep disregard for one another, a common competition and one ups man ship. We do not see a common vision, a common understanding of God, or a common core message that you would see if Jesus were actually leading our groups and meetings.

If we summarized and compiled the main points and core teachings from every sermon in even one town, I think we would see chaos, human wisdom, human diligence and brilliance, much tradition, and busyness, and in my opinion, very little from the Lord.

We don’t quickly notice this chaos because our group is typically on the same page (if leadership is strong).

The point I am driving toward is that our system of gathering together is an inherited mess, the system itself causes chaos and division from within.   Most Christians that I know, especially pastors, are wonderful people with pure motives who find themselves in an inherited religious system.  Our system of hierarchy confuses and divides us, it distracts us from the Lord, we each follow our own religious hero from our area and generation, we are mostly indifferent to God’s people in the next town (or even up the street), we promote our group over and at the expense of other groups and then boldly call this serving God.

This current inherited religious system was built not by Jesus and the first century apostles but mostly by the Roman church in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, sure it has evolved and modernized a bit but at its core it is the same.

As far as gathering together is concerned, we are, as a whole, without vision from heaven, we are scattered, competing, indifferent and most importantly, distracted from Jesus Christ by our ‘ministries’, the very things that we assume he expects and wants from us.

Needless to say … this problem drives me crazy, I have written about it and posted about it for over a year now.  Irritating people from every corner.  I now restrain myself from posting and publishing much much more about it for the sake of not risking getting stoned.

I have come to believe that church hierarchy and human centered leadership and the competition it causes are evil.  Church hierarchy and gathering around sermons and pastors is a generational tradition which disables the global church from within, we are largely disconnected from the head and from one another (temporarily). Don’t hear me wrong I am not say that We are evil but our ministry philosophy, our philosophy about gathering is of human tradition and is not of God.

We are essentially taken out of many spiritual battles. I believe that our nation is and has been struggling because of this, politically our nation is in as big of a mess as I can remember.   I believe that our national problems are rooted in our church traditions or they could be resolved quickly.

So that is a major problem I realize bigger than any one of us could solve alone but thanks to an experience Jesus had in Bethany we see that the solution is exceedingly simple to resolve, Jesus can solve generations of problems with one sentence. Click [Gathered around Jesus] for the amazing solution.