If you could teleport a first-century resident of Judea into a modern Sunday morning church service, they would be fascinated. Not just by the electric guitars and the PowerPoint slides, but by the fundamental structure of the whole thing.
Some time over the last two thousand years, a radical, anti-establishment movement got institutionalized. The very movement that began by flipping tables over religious bureaucracy has somehow become that very bureaucracy.
To understand how we got here, we have to look at who Jesus actually was, what his first followers actually believed, and how we traded a wild, diverse faith for a rigid system.
We often see pictures of a calm and gentle Jesus, but the historical figure was deeply disruptive. Jesus didn’t spend his time critiquing the secular world; his fiercest anger was directed at the religious elite of his day.
The religious establishment of first-century Judaism had created a complex system of rules, traditions, and fences around the law that kept the elite in power.
Jesus repeatedly broke their rules. He worked on the Sabbath, ate with societal outcasts, and openly mocked the religious leaders’ obsession with external rituals while their hearts were far from God. When he drove the money chargers out of the Temple in Jerusalem, he wasn’t just throwing a tantrum; he was staging a direct religious protest against a corrupt system that capitalized on people’s desire to get close to God.
Jesus’s message was clear. People matter more than systems. Love matters more than rules.
After Jesus left the scene, his followers didn’t immediately sit down, write a systematic theology book, and form a global church denomination. For the first few centuries, Christianity was a decentralized, diverse network of house churches scattered across the Roman Empire.
Modern believers are often surprised to learn just how much early Christians disagreed on core ideas. For centuries, there was no single consensus on major doctrines. Long before the Council of Nicaea formalized the Trinity in 325 AD, early Christians intensely debated how Jesus related to God the Father. Some viewed him as a human adopted by God, while others saw him as a divine being subordinate to the Father. Even concepts regarding the afterlife like heaven and hell were far from standardized. Some early church fathers leaned heavily toward the belief that everyone is eventually saved. Some viewed hell as annihilation of the soul, rather than eternal torment. Being a “pastor” was not even a possible career choice. Such a position simply did not exist.
Early Christians didn’t kill each other over theological differences. They debated, but shared meals while facing common persecution. Their unity was never about absolute intellectual agreement; it was about a shared devotion to the way of Jesus.
So, what happened?
In the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and the faith went from a persecuted minority movement to the official religion of the empire.
Almost overnight, the church inherited the power, the wealth, and the organizational structures of Rome. To govern a massive empire, you need uniformity. You can’t have people disagreeing about the nature of God or the afterlife. The councils were called, creeds were written, and “heretics” were cast out. The church became the state, and the state became the church. The radical movement was successfully tamed and institutionalized.
This brings us to the modern church. In our pursuit of self-preservation and organizational efficiency, we have largely become the very system Jesus warned against. The modern church is obsessed with boundaries, spending unnecessary energy policing who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ based on doctrinal checklists and talking points. Because of this, I rarely know how to answer when people ask if I am a Christian. While my reverence for Jesus has only deepened over time, my perspective is unwelcome in most church circles, leaving me to wonder: am I a bad Christian, or not a Christian at all? I genuinely don’t know, so I just say something like “I’m a cultural Christian.”
The only saving grace is that my dad, who was a pastor of a church up until just a few months ago, seems to be completely accepting of me regardless. What is clear is that we routinely protect institutions, reputations, and budgets at the direct expense of the people those institutions were created to serve. These institutions can be emotionally abusive, as nuance and doubt are treated as liabilities rather than natural parts of a healthy faith.
When a religious system becomes so focused on its own rules and structures that it loses its capacity for radical inclusion of people with diverse perspectives, it ceases to look like Jesus. It looks a lot more like the people who crucified him. It is time to return to the wild, boundary-breaking radicalism of Christ. We must reclaim a faith that challenges bureaucracy and power.
