Find Yourself A Church That Encourages Spiritual Growth

Image Source: Cliffymania.com

I grew up in a good church (or at least that's what I thought back then). Nothing seemed wrong with what we were taught in church. In that church, we believed in the Trinity, we believed in praying in tongues and other gifts of the Holy Spirit. We believed in miracles and we believed in Christ as the center of all we are and do. There really didn't seem to be anything harmful about the church. I was a dedicated member, as I (like most other Christians) swallowed everything I was taught. I grew up learning not to question or confirm things before believing them, as long as they came from the man of God. But this didn't seem to harm me.

A few months before my graduation from the university, I encountered some serious opposition to the doctrines of the church I grew up in. I met a young man whose name I wouldn't mention; he was the one who set me on a path of doubt: doubt that led me to the truth.

In that church, among the other things we believed in, we also believed in prosperity for every Christian. While the prosperity gospel has always been up for debate, I didn't see anything wrong in it until I encountered some truths from God's Word. I started by reading the books of Paul, especially Romans and the letters to the Corinthians. After reading those books, I then started to study them. As time passed, I started to see contradictions between what Paul taught and many of the things I grew up learning about Christ and Faith from many pastors.

It would take me too long to start to point out some of the things I had issues with but the most important thing I noticed was that the church I was attending, while they intended to help us grow spiritually, was not helping me grow theologically. My knowledge of the Bible, of God and of the intricacies of life was faulty. The fact that they were not helping me grow in that wise also affected my outlook on the world. The more I studied the New Testament, the more I noticed how far away from maturity I was. There were times when I felt I was been handed down a watered down version of the Gospel, and there were times when I felt I was being lied to.

I wasn't getting any stronger as a Christian and I started to see why. In the coming months, I began detaching myself from the doctrines of that church, while I was still attending their services because I had to (I was living with people who still attended the church). At times, I would sit in church and try to see if there was something being taught that could help me, but there was none. I was languishing and my walk with God suffered for it.

As God would have it, I recently came across a church in Lagos that fit the bill of what I wanted: a church that taught the pure Gospel and encouraged spiritual growth. Now I'm happier and my walk with God is better. There are so many things I would love to write here but time and space constrain me.

However, the good thing is that you can pick this lesson: find a church that encourages you to grow. There's nothing entirely wrong with prosperity, there's nothing wrong with healing and miracles. But those are not the focal points of the Gospel. The focus of the whole Gospel is the person and work of Jesus Christ. All the scriptures point to Him, and to His glorification. There's this plague called 'God-And' that runs across many churches now. The God-And plague never presents God as enough; blessings or some other things must be attached to make Him attractive to the sinner. That is why covetousness and greed are rife among Christians nowadays. That's why some Christians worship their pastor above God: the pastor can never be wrong, they say. They are so dependent on the pastor that God becomes a distant entity to them, when it ought not be so. May God help us all.

So, find yourself a church that prioritizes God and spiritual growth above any other thing. You can't go wrong that way.