Netfriend:

Love is not a matter of feeling but of action. I am an Exiled Believer alienated by Church and I really don’t see any point in returning. I spent 20 years in a wide assortment of churches. They stuffed me up more than helped me. They were quick to take my money but slow to help me in my time of need. Out of the thousands I met over that time period I could count the genuine people I respected on a couple of hands. However, it would take me hundreds of hands to list the ratbags that harmed myself and others over that time.

It is up to the church to adapt to ME not me to adapt to the church. If the church wants me it needs to change. I can live quite well without it. It has given me no benefit that I cannot find elsewhere. It has wasted my time with shallow teaching and an avoidance of attempting answering the biggest and most important questions. It is not related to REAL LIFE. It is boring. It seems that church is the last place to look if you want to find God.

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… I live in a state of exile from the presuppositions of my own religious past. I am exiled from the literal understandings that shaped the creed at its creation. I am exiled from the worldview in which the creed was formed.

The only thing I know to do in this moment of Christian history is to enter this exile, to feel its anxiety and discomfort, but to continue to be a believer. This is now my self-definition. I am a believer who increasingly lives in exile from the traditional way in which Christianity has heretofore been proclaimed. “A believer in exile” is a new status in religious circles, but I am convinced that countless numbers of people who either still inhabit religious institutions or who once did will resonate with that designation.

….

Exile is never a voluntary experience. It is always something forced upon a person or a people by things or circumstances over which the affected ones have no control. … Exile is an enforced dislocation into which one enters without any verifiable hope of either a return to the past or an arrival at some future desired place. … The Christian faith came into existence in a world radically different from the one it now seeks to inhabit. … The biblical view of the universe was slowly and quietly discarded. … People began to grasp the fact that God did not sit on a throne beyond the sky looking down. Divine intervention became a problematic concept. As the knowledge of the universe grew, the religious community tried to adjust. Christianity began to shift God’s dwelling place form “up there” to “out there,” as if somehow that new spatial image made God more believable. Finally … distances overwhelmed even this concept of God’s dwelling place. …. Our embrace of the vastness of space had the effect, finally, of removing God from the sky and then increasingly even from our human consciousness. … Those biblical accounts were so obviously shaped by the ancient three-tiered worldview, whose shape Copernicus and Galileo and countless other had delineated, began to awaken to the fact that they could no longer use any of the traditional language about God and a heaven “out there” that so deeply filled our ancient faith system. That language had lost its meaning. …

Truth can never be deterred just because it is inconvenient. .. We like the Jews of old, had been forcibly removed from all that had previously given life meaning. …. No way out of this exile is either visible or guaranteed. ….

from John Shelby Spong in “Why Christianity Must Change Or Die” (HarperSanFrancisco : 1998)p. 20 ff entitled “On Saying the Christian Creed With Honesty” & “The Meaning Of The Exile And How We Got There” … and which describes me accurately ….