I have, as I've said, enjoyed an in and out relationship with the church.

I stopped going to church in my late teens, not because I had lost my faith, but because, in my eyes, the organised church seemed to bear little relationship to what I read in my bible. It all seemed too polite, well mannered and inoffensive whereas Jesus teaching was challenging and proved so threatening to the religious establishment of his time that they put him to death.

I was reading 'A Level' history and a passage in Tawney's, 'Religion and the rise of Protestantism' jumped out at me with the power of revelation. The essential message was that, whilst theological arguments raged about the primacy of scripture over ecclesiastical authority and so forth, the determining factor in whether the reformation took hold in a particular region or not and the form it took, Lutheran or Calvanist, was primarily determined by the political interests of the local ruler. Inspiration I decided was divine but its institutional form on earth was all too human.

I had stumbled across an idea that I have only recently discovered was advanced by the sociologist Max Weber; the socialisation of charisma. Charismatic authority depends on the personality of the Leader but when the Leader passes on it becomes bureaucratised and codified by followers losing its original power. The strength of the Christian idea, in my view is that has constantly been reborn with fresh manifestations, Christians would say of the Spirit; only for each of these in their turn to be routinised and reduced to the imperfect human organisations we see.

But there was another, associated reason I gave up on church in my teens. Jesus message as I understood and understand it was that holiness isn't about religious observances and how we seem on the outside. It's about the love we feel on the inside and how we behave with other people. I was to all outward observances 'good' , in as far as I didn't do things I shouldn't, but I was cripplingly shy and not great at socialising. It seemed more important through my college years to be at ease with my contemporaries than to go to church and identify myself as a Christian.

The reality is we are like the embers of a fire. The embers in a fire warm each other but when you pull an ember out of the fire it begins to cool. I thought of myself as a Christian but in truth my faith was weak and not thought through.

The event that brought me back into the church was without doubt the most horrendous thing that has ever happened to me but that is a topic for another post. Suffice it to say I was a very committed church goer for many years but through personal reasons of my own making became separated from the church again and am currently, if I can allude to the parable of the prodigal son, in a 'far country'.

I think of the church on two levels. On the one hand it is a mystical entity consisting of all believers who claim the word Christian for themselves and seek to place themselves under Christ's influence. The other sense is the institutions referred to above through whom teachings and practice are codified and passed on and through which authority is exercised. But the key point related to either or both of these ideas of church is that, if we claim to be Christian, we ARE the church.

The church is a human institution with human failings for the simple reason it's made up of humans. The point about going to church isn't to show everyone what a great person you are its to admit that you fouled up and move on. Jesus said (Mark 2:17) it's not those who are healthy who need a physician but those who are sick.

The most cursory exploration of history will demonstrate how often and how badly the churches have got it wrong but they are human institutions with human failings. The churches and ministers worth following admit their frailty and don't claim to have all the answers. God is a very big idea. Anyone who claims to know the mind of God, should be avoided. Worst of all are those, from any religion, who believe they are sufficiently acquainted with the mind of God to justify harming others.

Non believers seem to think that being a Christian means accepting without question the teachings of your particular denomination and essentially doing as you are told. In my experience most Christians are perfectly capable of questioning church authority and do. The role of the church as an institution is to codify the religion and establish a consensus around how it should be practised.

We need to be mindful of the religious consensus, particularly if our ideas are out on a limb, but God created us with the power of reason so we are presumably meant to exercise the gifts he gave us? We can believe in a once and for all revelation and that there is nothing new to learn or we can believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, God continues to reveal himself. If we believe the latter, as I do, our understanding continues to move on. Inevitably different people's understanding moves on at a different pace and the institutional churches, with responsibility for preserving what is important from the tradition, move slowest of all.

Horrendous things have been done either in the name of the church or by individuals with a position of trust in the church. There is no denying this but the answer is to be continually questioning our faith, stripping it down and returning it to those core beliefs about loving God; the source of meaning and purpose in our lives, and loving one another. Institutions are necessary but we should never lose sight of their fallibility.
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