in the meantime

The church of the future therefore, needs to go back to the first century and try again. Back to when we had the teachings of Jesus in its infancy— before His stories became exaggerated and before new stories were created by the new testament writers to further their cause—which however, was totally justifiable at the time as it was the only way for their religion to survive in that era.

The problem is, we are no longer living in that era, so we need to go back to that time and discover ‘Jesus the person’ once again, keeping in mind that the gospel writers were merely painting a portrait, not using a camera. If we can do this, we will go a long way in finding the ‘church of the future’—one that rejects a religion of fear, close-mindedness, and self-deception of the past, and replaces it with an honest and living faith of the future.

Jesus said there were higher understandings to be realised at a later time when, in John's account of his life, he told his listeners that he had "much more to say to you, more than you can now bear." (John 16:12) therefore implying that there would be a later time when such understanding would be possible, that time will be, when human growth has finally learned to respond to inside prompting and no longer feels constrained to parrot and conform to the socially familiar.

I believe this is a natural progression and we will get there, but until then, I won’t have much to do with the churches of today. We will always of course, still go to celebrate and validate friends and relatives rights of passage—where people are ‘hatched, matched, or dispatched’ through its ceremonies to be sure, but the ritual of going each and every week to worship as we have done in the past, I do not think will survive.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace

-  Sri Chinmony Ghose

we need religion however

Huston Smith says. ‘Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example—master -slave, caste, and gender relations—have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them."

spirituality = religion – prejudice

therefore

spirituality + prejudice = religion

-  MiesterX

breaking up from within

Along with the eastern religions which I mentioned earlier, other Christian churches have also sprung up to fill this void, with many people moving toward Protestantism. The Catholic Church has in response made some token concessions (rather than risk losing the rest of it’s population base) to place the bible into some sort of context that we can recognise in today’s world. It has even acknowledged some of its many contradictions and straight out falsities from days gone by, but continues to be preoccupied in giving black and white answers in an ultimately grey world. This may work for the right wing believers who need to fill their insecurity with certainty (by the way, why is it these churches who claim to have the answers don’t allow any questions?) anyhow, while they refuse to progress, they will never reach secular society as a whole, let alone my liberal viewpoint.

In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.  -  J.H. Newman