You’ve been duped.

Western Christianity as we know it is a sick racket.

Sure, there are legitimate reasons to pool our money. Visiting the sick, the elderly, taking care of widows and orphans, and helping the poor. These are great reasons to expend resources and even employ people.

But the practice of showing up once or twice a week to “get fed” and to, “forsake not the assembling of ourselves together,” is the perpetuation of a racket as old as time itself. Preying upon the good intentions of naïve and ill-informed people to support a class of priests, clergy, “ministers” (or insert your term of choice here) is a sophisticated scam.

Now let me say right here that not all the perpetrators of this fraud are guilty of participating in it intentionally. Some, if not most, get involved for all the right reasons. They start out wanting to help people. They feel “called” to it. And many of them have legitimate giftings that are helpful to people. Some can teach, some can provoke and encourage, some legitimately hear from God and have genuine insight into His heart and purposes.

But the systems that make up modern-day Christianity aren’t conducive to producing mature functioning believers. What they are good at is keeping hungry people in a state of near malnourishment with no means of feeding themselves. This keeps them addicted to the meager crumbs that fall from the table once a week.

In such a weakened condition that they’re not able to articulate what’s wrong, these starving masses continue to show up as often as they can… hoping that somehow this week they’ll “get something” that will help them. They remain involved, not realizing that their distended spiritual bellies aren’t big because they’re well-fed, but instead because they’ve digested and re-digested the same rotting garbage over and over.

Show Me the Money

Economically speaking, these systems perpetuate themselves by demanding from the spiritually impoverished and non-discerning that they give of their means to “support the Gospel.” This support pays salaries, maintains billions and billions of dollars worth of nearly unused buildings, and funds ineffective initiatives that make any respectable businessperson shudder.

In rare moments of real spiritual activity, even more funds are demanded and expended to support “revivals” that have little long-term impact and mostly just waste more resources in the name of more meetings that drop crumbs to the hungry.

Racketeers of the itinerant variety criss-cross the civilized world in an effort to keep people motivated and perhaps to provide an entertaining sideshow, while the most responsive are recruited to join the racket and “use their gifts for God.”

Millions of hours of valuable volunteered time are squandered regularly on fruitless activities keeping buildings clean, counting offerings, parking cars, entertaining children, and recruiting the uninitiated so the fraud can go on.

Like desperate poverty-stricken garbage dump-dwellers, the dissatisfied wander from one gathering place to another, hoping that perhaps a different location may sooth their hunger pangs. This “shuffling of the saints” creates the rise and fall of new congregations, even as their leaders are chewed up and spit out by the unattainable demands of perfection placed upon them by their followers.

Like all great deceptions, there are little chunks of truth neatly packaged in with all the filth… some of it more heavily concentrated in some pockets than in others. The truth presented is just enough to seemingly validate the lies, and to salve the consciences of those that question.

In some pockets, those whose questions are too numerous or perhaps too deep are shunned. Perhaps worse, they are sometimes indicted as heretics and manipulated or controlled into submission. They are told that the authority structure is beyond question, that disrespecting the “anointed” is tantamount to original sin. Many quiet down and shamefully submit. Others simply drop out of the charade.

The numbers of those who have been wounded have multiplied. Unhealthy relationships abound. Families are destroyed. Respectable people ruined.

Some who drop out endeavor to cultivate a real faith and one-on-one relationship with the One in Whose Name the fraud is carried out. Others regard Him as the doer of the deed and keep their distance.

In all of this, the serpent of old is pleased. The people that belong to the One he attempted to usurp are fragmented, starving and hopelessly ineffective. A job well done.

The time has come to blow some stuff up.