The ‘Ortho’ Spectrum

My church experience was SOMETHING ELSE, let me tell you.

Growing up in Connecticut, I had spent the first few years at an “emerging church” (as they called it there), and I loved it. The Sunday School was engaging, I had made some great friends, and the church community was on my mind virtually every day due to getting together with other families or actively participating in outreach efforts.
HOWEVER, the church as a whole was NOT doctrinally sound. We very rarely dove into the Bible- the focus was primarily on God’s love and forgiveness, while actively avoiding the subject of God’s hatred toward sin. Spoiler alert: 22-year-old me disagrees with that attitude around Christianity.

Years later (probably around 3-7), that same church went for an attempt towards planting a sister church in a town nearby. It was a collaborative effort between my family and a couple of other families from the first church. Great people, but no real progress in terms of growing it with a substantial number of new people.

So right after that, we decided to diverge and join a Presbyterian church. I went from 60-0 REAL fast. What do I mean by that? Overall (in my experience), a lot of the more ‘reformed’ churches you’ll go to heavily lean towards holding a high priority for proper doctrine. Too important at times, I think. That church wasn’t very active in terms of outreach- we fell SO in love with Calvinism that we forgot about Christianity. Personally, I tended to use the doctrine around the ‘elect’ as a justifier to sit at home and attend to my indulgences. (<NOTE: I refer to hobbies and human interaction here)

Eventually, I did find a lot of churches that had a nice balance of ORTHOPRAXY and ORTHODOXY. But that’s not the point of this post; the point is that there is a spectrum, with both extreme ends labeled as the above-capitalized terms. All churches today fall somewhere in between. When I reflect on my church experience, I think it’s kind of funny how I just happened to be exposed to churches that fell on each respective extreme end. It’s given me perspective. I want to know how to answer the question “How might we unify THE church of God today?”

If anything, I hope this post gets you to think. I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything, other than just the mere idea that you should reflect and think about whether your church has a healthy balance between doctrine and practice, and see how you can contribute your gifts and talents to the betterment of the church as a whole.

– Caleb