Monday, January 21, 2013

Conversation with a GLB student - Christianity as an unorganized religion

A GLB (Graduate LLB) student I know in school was talking to me about his practice of Christianity. For him, he does not go to church on Sundays, because he thinks that the contemporary conception of the church as an institution as not being biblical. Instead, his idea of church is meeting up with his group of like-minded Christian friends on Sundays.  He says that this notion of Christianity is known as 'organic Christianity'. I just did a check on this term but received no search result matching his description of unorganized church. He argues that the notion of the church as expressed in the bible was simply the fellowship of Christians. There was no concept of church having pastors.

I am very skeptical of this unconventional notion of Christian practice of the Sabbath. I asked him how the liturgies, like the Holy Communion would be practiced without a minister. He addressed my question by saying that the practice of Holy Communion as expressed in the bible was not liturgical, but an actual feast. He refers to the account described in 1 Corinthians 11:21 where Paul addressed the improper conduct of the Corinthians in partaking the Holy Communion. In that context, the congregants were partaking the Holy Communion with substantial amount of food on the table such that some were eating to their fullness while others were starving.

In my opinion, the forms of early churches should be seen in its context and not taken to impute the model of the church that exists today. Taken to its extreme, why, we Christians should live in communes. Given the constraints of early Christianity, it was only practicable to be gathering in small numbers. I would like to discredit his notion of Christian living, and I would try asking my Christian friends and pastor about it. But even if I can't, I don't see why institutional practice of Christianity should be contradictory to the bible. After all, the predecessor Abrahamic faith to Christianity, Judaism, is marked with institutionalized practices. Now, I don't there is any specific mention in the bible frowning upon institutionalized practices of the church, and neither is there any prescription for Christianity to be an unorganized religion. We simply take each accounts of the type of practices to be descriptive and not prescriptive of the way the Christian religion can be practiced.  

It reminds me of what I have read about the Tolstoyan movement which takes after the teaching of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who critiques the institutional practice of Christianity by the Russian Orthodox Church. The difference is that the Tolstoyan movement takes the practice of Christianity as an unorganized religion even further, with its mantra of 'the kingdom of God is within you'. I suppose it advocates for an even more ascetic, hermit-like form of Christian practice than what has been described to me by this GLB student.

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