Hi Kimberley!
You have raised a topic that I was thinking about bringing up on the Wounded Pilgrims thread as another thing we must face after leaving the Assembly. Since you have raised the issue here I will just make my comments on this thread and see what others have to say.
Nothing like visiting churches proves the point that we received some pretty big wounds from our Assembly past. We can come to church with the mindset that we will not allow our old Assembly thinking/feelings to control our responses to the event only to react like someone poured salt into an open wound!
Things like, "are those who welcome me really sincere, or are they just trying to get us to join up like they did in the Assembly?" "When the preacher uses certain trigger phrases like, 'commitment', 'surrender', 'putting God first in our lives', what does he really mean by that?"
In other words we are very fearful of getting hurt again and know only too well how these above phrases and actions can be used to serve the group, but not the individual in their lives with the Lord.
It does no good to tell ourselves that these folks don't mean by what they do and say what the Assembly meant by it as our emotional reactions take over and we can feel like Kimberley and start looking for the exits. I have heard of this reaction many times and one person told me they were on the verge of throwing a large hymn book at the preacher as he held forth on all the things God wanted us to do as Christians.
The Bible is loaded with commands about actions and attitudes that we should adopt now that we are Christians and this provides ample ammunition for Christian preachers who are unaware of those wounded from performance based systems of belief who are listening and ready to fire back with large hymn books!
My experience is that these preachers have no idea that their message would possibly be received in the way that would trigger such strong emotional reaction.
I talked with one pastor soon after leaving the Assembly about a message he brought on commitment and how it bothered me. He felt that "commitment was the key to intimacy with Christ," and that "this is what it meant to abide in Christ." When I asked him, "commitment to what?" he could only come up with a general kind of statement: "commitment to God." Iasked, " in a personal devotional way, to the church, to one another, to personal behavior that glorifies God, or all of the above? And if it is any or all of these to what level of success must I gain in order to experience abiding in Christ?"
The pastor was stunned by the question and saw that he was caught in a kind of trap of promoting a course of action that sounded good, but made our inheritance of life in Christ unattainable. This is what I mean by an earlier post that stated that we as Wounded Pilgrims can be a great blessing to our brethren in the evangelical world,
Yes, God wants commitment, obedience, Christ likeness, and commands us to walk worthy of our calling, but not as a means to intimacy rather as a result of the fact of our union with Christ. Before we get to Ephesians chpts. 4-6 we need to read 1-3 where we see that we are safely bound together with Christ for eternity and are now His beloved children.
This is the grace that Kimberley mentions and what we as exassemblyites need so desperately to concentrate on for it is the means of healing, restoration, and life. Those who have not lived through what we did also need to understand this, but God has sent us before to be a living message for our brethren that might give them pause for thought.
Trials will come to everyone and in that sense we are all Wounded Pilgrims and God has fitted us to come along side and comfort these with the message of hope of the grace of God. Our own sinful humanity has a way of pulling off our poorly attached fig leaves and showing us for the phonies we really are.
As I also mentioned before conservative Christians easily run the risk of slipping out of a grace based relationship and getting into the ol' rat race of performance based kind of religion. For us such a mistake will not be made again for we bear in our body the scars of that mistaken path and our new sensitivity will cause us to react very quickly to any hint of such a curse filled way!
Let's pray for Kimberley and all of us that we find places that either understand grace or are open to understanding it in a clearer light.
God bless and Merry Christmas!!
