Conscience calls

When I became a Christian I promised Jesus that I would follow him. I probably didn't realize till later that this meant following him wherever he would lead me. I think of the disciple fishermen who dropped their nets and lives to follow the divine mystery. As I sit here, lost after a church service themed Uganda/Kabubbu, I feel a weight on my heart and a desperation in my gut. I am confronted repeatedly by the choice I have made, everything in my being screaming the question: when is it time to leave everything behind for the gospel?

If I were called before the judgement seat of God now and asked about it, I would say that I feel as though I should throw in the towel and leave this church behind to follow Jesus. That sometimes I feel as though it is black and white, and that as a married couple we make it more complicated than it really is with our thoughts and compromises and analyses. That this place is a dead end, that this is not where the gospel will be served through us, that it is a waste of time for us. I would pour my heart and soul out to him with all the anger, pain, and disillusionment that I have carried inside me for so long; I would tell him that the more I look at it, the more I see role modelled in this church an obsession about superficialities, church services and performances, all worldly values veiled in the jargon of English Christendom, all the worse for the fact that they are marketed under the banner of church. I would tell him that my conscience is telling me to follow him where he leads me, far away from here, deep into the bowels of need and injustice, into honest community and humble service to each other and to him.

Sometimes I wish I could cry it out, that it were easier to explain how much this hurts. I find myself wondering why we put ourselves through this torture - the torture of being part of a system where the gospel is not the vision of a blind institution that perpetuates all sorts of rubbish in the name of Christ - when we could be taking upon ourselves the divine torture of living out the gospel, with all the hardship and suffering that comes part and parcel of joyfully seeking God's will. I wonder why we are choosing this futile, ungodly torture over the torture of the Christian journey, when we have been put on this earth for a finite time by our Maker to live out the gospel for him, when our world slowly crumbles and people die by the second and creation cries out for us to be God's hands and feet in the broken world that he loves so much.

I feel like more and more I have to tranquilize my heart, mind, and conscience in order to exist in this institution, and sometimes I wonder to God whether it is killing me. Suddenly I am painfully aware that all this is a waste of time and a ludicrous farce pointlessly sustaining itself in the name of church, while billions of our brothers and sisters, made of the same flesh and blood as us, with hopes and dreams and desires just like we do, live in desperation and need. If this is the way it is supposed to be, if this is the gospel and the church that Jesus wanted, then I don't want any part of it. But this is not the way he wants it to be, and I always knew it.

We read Isaiah 58 tonight and it was torture. I sat operating the laptop, surrounded by sound systems, PAs, technology, and stressed out musicians performing and acting in the quest for perfection rather than the love of God and neighbour - all this culture the centre of our leader's obsession and mind space. And my conscience punched my heart and my heart shouted at my head and everything in me knew that I had no idea what I was doing there.

I made my choice long ago to follow Jesus. I just don't know when it is time to give up on this church to do it.