Why I Left My Church

The Arrogance, the Show, and the Vanity

In late 2009, I was introduced to a new Pentecostal church when my family began attending it. I had never heard of the church, but I viewed myself as fairly open to learning about the teachings of the bible from different perspectives. It wasn’t always like that for me.

Why I left church #1

I was raised Roman Catholic and so was my wife. Baptism, Confession, First Holy Communion, Confirmation — we did all of it. We were even married in a Catholic church, and taught English and Spanish Sunday School classes from the Catholic perspective. But over time, I began to realize how little I had read the actual bible.

The things I remember most about attending Catholic church service were all the rituals. It was full of specific prayers, gestures, bell ringing and moments of silence, perfectly timed and formatted to fit into one hour. Our requirements as Catholics were to participate in the rituals with choreographed standing, kneeling and sitting. We invoked specific prayers in unison, and we were supposed to respond to specific words spoken by the priest, whom we referred to as “Father.”

As a young boy, I can remember many times that I would get to church and activate the stopwatch function on my digital watch. I would then daydream for an hour, occasionally watching the minutes accumulate. By this age, my participation was robotic, and no one ever realized I wasn’t paying attention.

As I became older, I listened to the sermons a little more, but it always seemed to be underwhelming. For me, it wasn’t enough context, and the sermons never answered my actual questions. I often wondered if there was more to the bible than was being presented in this stilted format.

From my own experience in the Catholic Church, we only read passages that pertained to the particular sermon being given. All we ever received was a monthly missalette, a small guide book containing the relevant bible passages so we could follow along. Also in it were the specific instructions telling us when to kneel, sit, and stand, as well as the prayer words with which we were to respond, when prompted by the Father. It was never required, and we were never encouraged to read, much less study, the bible on our own.

It weighed on me. The ritual part also bothered me a little, though at the time I didn’t know why. All these years later, however, and combined with an intensive study of leadership and management, I realize the rituals did not amount to anything more than a form of behavior management.

No one in the administration of Catholicism would call it that, not in the lower tiers of the organization anyway, but that is essentially what rituals do. And this type of behavior management is present in nearly all organizations, religious or not, either purposely and/or accidentally. The rituals aren’t what prompted me to leave the Catholic Church. It was the idea that the method in which they presented their answers to the meaning of life should be sufficient for everyone.

Well, it wasn’t, and I was ready to move on.

Why I left church #2

Later in life, I found a Christian church that encouraged us to bring our own bibles, so that we could read from them, highlight them and even take notes in them to help with clarification. This was completely unheard of for me, but I found that I thoroughly embraced it. After attending regularly for several weeks, my wife and I left the Catholic Church for good.

The new Christian church we attended continued to grow. And grow. At the time I had not heard the term megachurch, but that is essentially what it was. Soon the church was being attended by government officials, local celebrities and other people of influence. The church began hosting concerts and conferences and money just continued to pour in. The hallways and lobby were filled with people, not to mention the bookstore, gift shop, coffee shop, bake shop, etc. Tons of people mingling, socializing and networking, and this was during church service.

After awhile, I felt the church had become a hub to satisfy the ulterior motive of individuals to expand their businesses, politics and latest multi-level marketing initiatives. And what better place was there to highlight the principles of a business or political scheme, while at the same time showing how it aligned with godly principles?

I won’t lie. The only reason I found that church in the first place was because I had my own multi-level marketing initiative. It just so happened that this church’s method of teaching from the bible was the exact thing for which I had been looking.

As time went on however, I felt the original Christian message had been lost, and it was slowly being replaced with a message of the right to prosperity in the present life. This was a time period when megachurches were on the rise, with many of them teaching what would later be called the prosperity gospel.

I am not necessarily opposed to the idea that righteous principles can lead to prosperity. I believe they can, but not always. The idea that I am opposed to is that prosperity equates to a righteous life, and then people using their prosperity to manipulate systems, giving themselves rights that are superior to the rights of the poor — and masking it all under the guise of righteousness.

As the church grew, I felt less and less significant. It wasn’t just me. It was many people. The church tried to compensate by creating more and more small and specialized groups. The intention was good, but the idea of surrounding myself with business wolves, in smaller and smaller rooms — forget it.

I appreciated the delivery of the Christian message far more than I ever did in the Catholic Church, but for me, this megachurch had become nothing more than gilded spectacle. One day I stopped going there and never returned.

Church #3

In late 2009, my marriage was on the verge of a complete collapse. This was the point when my wife and kids began attending the Pentecostal church without me. In the beginning, I had no intention of attending this new church, and when my family began attending regularly, and I was perfectly fine with it. My wife and I were separated and it was a chaotic time for all of us.

But over the next couple of months, I began to notice a few subtle changes in my wife and kids. They weren’t bad changes. They began showing signs of peace and acceptance with our living situation. And family time became a bit more sincere and precious.

The arguments my wife and I were constantly having disappeared. Spending too much time at work, not spending enough time with the family, not attending family events even when it was my own family and not hers, not having enough money — all gone. It became peaceful to go and visit my kids, even with my wife present, and that was something that hadn’t been true for a long time. It seemed to me that things had changed, maybe for the better, but that’s when I noticed their TV was gone.

I’m not saying that an alarm went off and that something was wrong. I still believe it’s a great idea to do a type of reset with your time, especially your family time. Taking a moment to get back to some basics, some fundamentals — I’d recommend this for anyone. However, in the back of my mind, I thought I should I look into this new church a little more.

End of Part One