Quote:
Originally posted by Moni:
It may be all well and fine for some people to expose themselves to hypocrisy within the walls of a church but some people (like myself), prefer to take a more honest approach to our christianity, our lives, and with what we do and surround ourselves with.
It is this approach to life that makes it so hard to find a truly good place of worship and it has plenty of people, true christian people, convinced that to do what they can when and where they can as opposed to making that public appearance every Sunday is well worth not attaching ourselves to the idea of being known as faithful for our appearance in church, but letting our faith be known to any and to all, anywhere and at any time.
To see christainity taken advantage of for the sake of a showing of self-glorification through the type of people who will attend church knowing they surround themselves with hypocrites but actively avoiding those people in that social surrounding is exactly why I remain a christian of courageous conviction who prefers to worship outside those walls of hypocrisy.
To say that those false christians who do attend church should be docked makes the people who really believe that no better than the people they would like to see docked...christianity is not about reducing the number of people you allow to worship with you but to uplift your fellow man in an example that might instill within them, the desire to be a better christian.
Not going to church does not make any christian any less of a christian than churchgoers nor does it make them any less a christian in God's eyes.
It is what we do from our hearts, not what we do for "show" that God sees.
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Moni, this is not a fair characterization of what Cloudbringer said.
You are correct that one can be an exemplary Christian without ever going to Church.
One can also be an exemplary Christian who goes to Church.
There are many reasons other than hypocisy and the desire to "show off" to join together with other people for organized religious rituals. Spiritual strentgh, energy, whatever you want to call it, can be magnified by participation in a ritual with others. The energies build on one another, so that the whole is greater than merely the sum of the parts.
Cloudy's brand of Christianity is every bit as valid as yours. Different paths do not mean one is better than the other: just that they are different.