How I came to write the book "Traveling Companions"
Greetings to all my fellow Traveling Companions, and to all of you who might one day choose to be Traveling Companions.
First things first. I am a Christian and faithful follower of Jesus Christ. I am also not a church goer. This may seem contradictory, but I am far from alone.
Many, many Christians in today's world are either non-churchgoers or are Santa/Bunny Christians who attend a church when Christmas or Easter decorations abound.
Churchgoers are taught that such people are deficient Christians, but I believe this judgment is largely unwarranted.
Christians who no longer go to church have made that decision for lots of reasons, but I want to tell my story. You see, my story has led to the writing of a book I think can be very helpful to people for whom church does not work. Including those who, like me, have decided it really does not work.
I attended the same church for most of twenty years. I contributed my time and money, investing "in the kingdom of God." But I noticed several glaring differences between "how church operates" and how the church is described in the pages of the Bible. The breaking point came when I had a conflict with another member of the church, and the means of resolving the conflict were very different from what the Bible led me to expect. This was the beginning of the unraveling of the image in my mind of the church representing the kingdom of God. Another kingdom was asserting dominance over church decision making, and whatever that kingdom was, I wanted no part of it. It has been at least a decade now that I have avoided church. The more I see of that other kingdom in the sermons, announcements, advertising of churches, the more I want to avoid them. One church advertised itself with this gem, "Relax. Church is not as bad as you think!" Hilariously, they tacitly announce the church is bad, but just not so bad as you imagine.
Anyway, I believe churches do a lot of good for a lot of people, and that they are generally filled with well-meaning, God loving Christian believers. I also believe that they are constrained by political realities that weigh in favor of certain elites. The people who control the money generally control the discourse, and those with little influence over the church's finances have opinions and thoughts that are routinely ignored. We used to have a saying in America that "what is good for General Motors is good for the country." When that saying was new, it was true. General Motors, at the time, was a major employer of both blue collar and white collar workers; it was also a major investment instrument, and provided roughly a third of Americans dependable cars to drive. Of course that is no longer the case, but a similar logic holds in many churches: "What is good for the elites is good for the church." This statement may seem cynical and harsh, and may apply much less to your church than others. However it is unavoidably true, in every church, to some extent.
I am not against church.
I am foursquare in favor of church. As an institution, it is a vital expression of the kingdom of God on Earth. Unquestionably, God is celebrated and revealed in churches every Sunday. The church is not the problem, and no change to the church can fix the "favoritism problem" -- it is an unchanging result of human nature.
The problem every church shares is that the elites effectively (and I suspect unthinkingly/unknowingly) "rig the system" to their own advantage: the sermons address the priorities and felt needs of the elites, the decisions taken by church leaders are skewed in favor of the elites, most conflicts between an elite and a non-elite are resolved in favor of the elite.
So what is the solution, if the church cannot be reformed?
Church reforms have led to the branching and splitting that have led to the thousands of Christian Denominations currently extant. I have no faith in church reform. I understand that to reform church is to deny the power of human nature to corrupt any human organization, even one dedicated to serving God.
So, I believe in a future in which pairs of believers, Traveling Companions, actually live out the command of Jesus to Love One Another. Some of those pairs will go to the same church. Some will go to different churches. And some pairs will go to no church at all. But every pair will be a living, breathing laboratory for experimenting with Love for Christ's Sake. Individuals in such pairs will become stronger, more loving, more accepting, more kind and more spiritually powerful. They might become spiritually powerful enough to contend with the elites, and might make churches better.
I am not holding my breath. However, I believe every person who has one or more Traveling Companions will realize the benefits of "reliable, dependable, mutual love." And those people will experience more, greater and deeper love as time goes by. Those are the people I had in mind when I wrote the book. And that is why I wrote the book.
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