Skip to main content

My Experience at a Non-Denominational Church.

My Experience at a Non-Denominational Church.

I got into a bit of trouble for my practise of mindfulness meditation. It made me feel like a hypocrite. It made me doubt my salvation and it forced me to alienate myself from that church and it's people. It made me feel that I was a bad person and unforgiven. There are many things that people do wrong, but as a Christian in this kind of a church, my entire life was on display 24/7. I was held accountable before this sin came out, and because of my pressure to conform to the ways of the world, I enjoyed this kind of small group accountability. But this sin of meditation didn't come out in a small group setting, it came out online on Facebook in public.

As a result I experienced emotional trauma for 3 years and ongoing, and a greater isolation from the other concerned people in my life. They and I didn't understand why I didn't attend this church anymore. I also lost my desire to serve the Lord, which I had been doing with fervour, and because of this I became a consumer Christian. Although I still believe in God, I find now that I really have to struggle to sense God's grace and Presence in my life. I ended up not resenting my friends there, and stayed in touch with a few of them, which proved to become one of my greatest comforts.

What I found is that there was no room for mistakes in my Christian life, but there was room for sin mistakes that were acceptable or common to this church. All I could think about since my sin was revealed was a sense of personal shame and or regret. I have not had the ability to move on with my life because my sin is still a sense of comfort and awakening to me. I'm not trying to be purposefully disobedient but I do want to worship God with my full heart, and I use meditation/contemplation to do this.

I don't like to think of myself as being a sinner or unsaved or out of fellowship with God, because I already have a cognitive disability, which makes my life already difficult. My sin was actually helping my disability, which the church couldn't recognize because to them, they would be out of fellowship with God, and with their church. This is Mike. I am writing this in a blog to bring a greater clarity and healing to my present situation in life, which is a feeling that I am l stuck and anxious and can't move on or let go.

At the time of writing this I was still confused about mindfulness meditation and the church. Mindfulness meditation is a spiritual ‘form’ of focused concentration which can be used as a spiritual exercise or for secular reasons that is not a part of church theology. Therefore I would caution any Christian from using it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Catholic Identity.

  I was born into the Catholic Church and was baptized as an infant, I had my first communion and reconciliation as a child, and was confirmed as a teenager. Although I was never devout, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour when I was 21 through an evangelical Christian radio ministry, which in turn gave new life to my Catholic faith. Although I remained a Catholic, I identified as a born again Christian. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I learned the difference between the two denominations and what they taught about being born again. Regardless, there was a significant change in my life back then, which continues to this day. Being Catholic is much like an identity to me and I remember growing up under the papacy of St. Pope John Paul II. The culture I grew up in was largely affected by his papacy, and the way the culture viewed the church was significantly different from the way the current culture views it. Growing up, the pope didn’t try to be rele...

Age of Brokenness.

  We are living in an age of brokenness, no matter what age you are, you probably have been touched with relationships falling apart, which causes more and more people to live in isolation. In this generation there is less of an incentive to heal and reconcile relationships, but that doesn’t excuse the amount of people who are broken. Why people don’t seem to be motivated to heal relationships is because our beliefs about faith and God have changed, really giving us less of an incentive to do what our religion says. If I act from my personal beliefs, but the person that I am responding to has abandoned religious beliefs, than the response to my wanting things to be better can be misinterpreted and rejected then by someone else. Generally when a society has expectations about broken relationships, loneliness and isolation, and the beliefs are generally accepted, society becomes a more compassionate society, because all value the same things. When religious values are undermined and ...

The Biblical Meaning of “Life in the Spirit.”

  “Life in the Spirit” is an example that the Apostle Paul gives in the book of Romans starting in chapter 5 and going through to chapter 8. He begins by telling us we are justified by faith (5:1), and have gained access by faith into the grace of God (5:2). We have been delivered from God’s wrath (5:9) and we have been reconciled to God through the death of His Son (5:10). He goes on to explain that through Adam all die (5:12), and that the free Gift of God brings justification and righteousness to the believing sinner (5:15-17).   Through our conversion we are baptized into Christ and into his death, which frees us from the law and makes us dead to sin (6:2-4). He explains that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we are given new life in Christ (6:4). Our old unregenerate self was crucified with Christ so that our body of sin might be done away with (6:5-6). Because we have died to sin, we now submit ourselves to God being that we are now under grace, not the law (6:8-1...