My Struggle With The Church Life

Hello,

My name is Youngbrotha227 and I am 25 years old. My whole life I have been raised as a church kid in the East Coast. I'm currently meeting a handful of times per year. I am grateful for being raised with God in my life and for having God fearing parents who have raised me with the love and guidance of God. However, I have always struggled with my faith ever since I reached the higher capacity to think critically around the age of 13. Perhaps my personality makes me identify very strongly as a unique individual person and since that age I never felt like I fit in with the Local Church.

Despite their genuine love and actions that prove how much they have always cared about me, I stopped going in high school. My parents never me treated badly because of it but I can tell it saddens them deep down inside. I have lived a life of sin since I was 13 years old. Not too long after going to the 6th grade conference and being baptized I started 7th grade and began to develop my personality as a rebellious, well intentioned but very adventurous young man. In some parts of my life I have even completely forgotten about the Lord and fallen into times of despair and suffering even to the point of suicidal thoughts and for many many years I did not even go to church but after many hardships and big mistakes I made in my life, God showed me that he was waiting there for me all along. That the Bible was the truth. I still cringe at all the times I should have listened to my parents. All the times I should have trusted my gut. Thankfully ever since, I made a promise to always listen to God's voice even when it was just a whisper in my conscience.

As I grew into adulthood, I met the love of my life (outside of the LC) and her simple, loving heart- the way she showed God's love guided me back to the Lord without anyone telling me to do so. She was the first girlfriend I ever prayed with and that experience changed my life. This was and continues to be a transformative moment in my life where I want to seek him out of my own initiative and not just to please anyone else or to "look good" in front of any group.

Since 2023, I have tried here and there to walk with God and to follow him. I will admit, I am still quite lukewarm and still have a lot of sin to work on but I really love God with all my heart. The big difference now is that I have finally for once experienced God as my personal God and not the God of my "parents' church" or trying to do "the right thing" to please anybody.

My spiritual hunger seems to come and go every few months and it guides me to seek him watching sermons on YouTube and reading a bit of the Bible. I love to watch Orthodox fathers videos on YouTube as well as talking about God with fellow believers (that aren't part of the LC), with my parents who genuinely follow God with all their hearts (but are part of the LC) and with anyone that genuinely wants to talk about God and think about God and not just regurgitate information , dogmas or ideologies.

I appreciate those companions who can be humble and think critically, not be afraid to question their beliefs and discuss their doubts openly. Sometimes I pray to the Lord and tell him straight up "Lord I don't know if you're there sometimes but then you always show me you are, thank you." That's the kind of person I am, I don't like to sugarcoat things and if there's something I don't understand you bet I will keep of poking and prodding until it makes sense to me. There's no use in blindly accepting any teaching.

My struggle with the Local Church has always been a feeling of pressure. I know with all my heart that the saints I have met throughout my life from the many different Local Churches I have visited love me and have good intentions for me. I always feel their genuine love when I decide to go to a Sunday meeting. However I am always annoyed when they start to invite me to every meeting because I have a busy life, I have many hobbies, dreams, aspirations and it feels forced for me to abandon the things that matter to me. I'll do it when God tells me to do it, I'll give up anything that God himself tells me to give up, just as I have done before even when I was walking through the desert of my teenage years. When I felt the spirit of God telling me to leave something I learned to always listen. To me it feels forced to ignore good people in my life that I love with all my heart just because they don't believe or because I'm too busy going to every meeting of the week. I will not abandon those who I love, I am loyal to them. I focus on expressing the Lord day by day and I can only hope that they see me expressing God's love.

My struggle with the Local Church traces back to when I was baptized. In my heart I knew that I loved the idea of God but that I only did it because "it was time" and that's what "you're supposed to do". I was just a kid trying to do the right thing. Even the chanting and the stanza reading has never felt natural to me. These are things that I love to do when the intention is sincerely born in my heart, not because I want to fit in or do what I'm "supposed to do".

It is NOW that the desire to be baptized has truly been born in my heart without anyone telling me to do so. It is now that I remember to pray and I do it genuinely. Now I want to follow God and I know that I simply am not compatible with the local church. I am not compatible because I don't want to feel like I'm being programmed to be "the perfect young person". I don't want to feel guilty for saying no to meetings and conferences. I don't want to have to turn off my mind and not question why the ministry is so selective with its authors. I don't want to feel guilty for not chanting along or saying no to reading a hymn out loud. I am not saying that I refuse to ever do these things but that I will do them when the Spirit genuinely implores me to do so, when it really feels right in my heart and mind. I don't want to go to any training and become a copy of this prototype Christian.

I have personally witnessed sisters who really seem depressed deep down in the inside and I can't even talk to them about it because of the strict intergender dynamics in the Local Churches. In some twisted way they probably think it's good for them to feel that way but from what I can tell they are only suppressing their feelings.

It might just be that I am proud or "the self" within me is too strong, but i know that if it is God's will then surely he will show me the way to live a more sincere Christian life.

I am the opposite of your "perfect" local church prototype, I don't dress like them, I don't like blindly following authority, I have long hair, I play non-explicit "worldly music"(mostly just love songs) , I love to dance at home with my friends, I love to tell jokes and mess around with ideas and beliefs just for the sake of testing their integrity. I don't like feeling like a dog with a muzzle. I don't like being trapped by social pressure or changing who I am to be part of the 'in' group. I always question why there is no initiative to visit prisons or feed the homeless.

I can't sit still at a conference for a whole weekend and I don't want to attend every college meeting of the week. Maybe I don't fit in well with Asian culture, maybe I have a hard time meeting brothers with the same background and struggles that I have had in my life. It's hard to open up when you've had a messy past and you feel surrounded by people who are too virtuous for you. It's embarrassing to me. I feel like hiding and that's why I don't go to church on Sunday. I know the enemy uses this as a weapon against us. God's blessing is so amazing we should never listen to Satan the accuser. I'm just being honest though, I am a young believer and I have my struggles too. I don't want all these innocent young saints to get any ideas from me, I don't want to be a bad influence on them. I don't want to volunteer for the summer school of truth and be someone I'm not in front of these wonderful young followers of Christ. I don't want a kid to ask me a question and then I give him a real "off script" answer.

I am not perfect and I know nobody is but the burden of having to live up to the LC standards forces me to wear a mask. I am conscious of this and this is why I avoid meetings. The last few times I have been to meetings I go off script during the prophesying portion and I talk real stuff from real life. I don't like using all these fancy words and intellectualizing the word of God. It always feels like I'm off script but I'm speaking from the heart at least. I don't see why there's such a strong obsession with the Morning Revival. I prefer having genuine conversations and not following any script, I value the deep connections I have with my friends and family because I can truly express myself around them. I am blessed to have parents who actually listen (even though back then they used to dismiss my troubles with "not exercising the spirit enough"). These are all parts of my soul which I find to be incompatible with the Local Church Movement. I cannot agree with the doctrine of losing myself completely to become the perfect man by the standards of Anaheim FTTA culture. No, I don't want to destroy who I am so I can become what a man is telling me to be. I cringe at the idea of "corporate" and other terms in the LC. I don't want to wear a uniform and behave in the prescribed way. These are man made standards. This "ideal" person still has a self,a very empty self perhaps for people like me who don't fit in but succumbed to the pressure. If you are one of those people and you are reading this, grow a backbone and learn how to say no. If you peel back the layers deep within they have suppressed their true self instead of allowing it to truly be transformed by God's love. This is equivalent to shoving your dirty laundry under your bed and making your room look clean versus actually taking the time to wash it, dealing with the actual mess and then folding piece by piece until your room truly has transformed. The self is always going to be there and shoving it away under a people pleasing personality isn't going to help. To me it would be a miserable existence to abandon myself in such a way. I know I have a lot of work to do. I am happy that I can examine myself and truthfully tell the Lord what my struggles are. I don't want to pretend. I only want to be perfect in the eyes of God and no one else. I want God to change me day by day.

I apologize for speaking so bluntly but if I ever went to FTTA and abandoned my personality, lost my quirks, lost the hair God put on my head (which I used to hate until I accepted that God made me that way), had to speak in "the tone", pray in a specific way and be completely shut off from life for two years I would absolutely lose my mind. I couldn't see that happening in a million years, I would absolutely hate my life if I was forced to hide who I am to such an extreme. That's why I don't go to the Sunday meetings very often, I don't like hiding who I am, I don't like feeling so different from the rest of the college saints who live such neat, nice lives. My life has been messy and I don't want to hide that from my fellow believers and be something I'm not.

Please pray for me in finding the right path. I know that true believers are everywhere, in every church there are people who love God with all of their heart. I have met them in many different churches. The church life is full of them too. I have met so many brothers with the most genuine love with beautiful testimonies. As I have realized recently many are just genuinely misguided, I am not one to judge. I tell you truthfully that I am lost right now, I haven't been to church consistently in over a decade but my spirit is aching to find the truth. Pretty much all of them just want to love God just like I do, just like you do and that is so beautiful to me. This is the true unity of the church, we are all lovers of Christ.

I just want to follow God, I want to be a genuine Christian. I don't know how to find a new church, I don't know how to tell my parents that I love the saints in the Local Church but that I want to explore my faith somewhere else. I don't know where to even start changing my life as a Christian besides reading the Bible. But I do know that when I get married, I do NOT want to take my wife to the Local Church. I am going to protect her beautiful soul.

If they ever changed her personality or changed who she was in such a drastic manner I would be immensely saddened by the fact that the woman I married became another person. The one time I ever took her to a meeting she ended up feeling guilty for wanting to dance to the hymns. It would break my heart to see her suppress who she is for the sake of pleasing others. If anyone is to change her let it be God, just like I want God to change me. It feels good when God changes me naturally and it is something I have been experiencing for the past few years. This feels like the true organic change I once heard about in the Local Church ministry. My heart and mind are at peace when the change comes from God and I can't help but to smile at these wonderful changes taking place in my life.

I have no time for phony Christianity, I am aware that this negative view of other churches has been taught to me. I have no idea where to go. I want to attend an Eastern Orthodox meeting to see for myself but I recognize that any institution made by man is bound to have imperfections, the only perfect thing that is in the church or any church is God himself. I would appreciate any insight you have to offer, any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated by a young brother like me. I would like to also thank you all in advance for taking the time to read this message and I send you much brotherly love. God bless you all.

Yours truly,
Youngbrotha227