How Churches Fall Short

During my lifetime, I have attended dozens of different congregations that all have had different doctrine, and I have found some main causes behind people not understanding and retaining the scripture. Even when people do manage to memorize what they have read, often many people do not understand what they have read. Overall, I will thus explain both the main problems that cause people to not understand and to not retain the scripture.

The root of most all problems that churches have with not understanding and with not retaining scripture is that clergy and members often do not identify the scripture's own testimony about what is most important in the scripture, and instead people find passages that the scripture does not attest as being the most central to be the most important. For example the people that have the least understanding and retention of the scripture will often only be able to quote popular passages such as, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", "judge not least you be judged", and "honor your father and mother." Overall, the root thus of the problem is that most people may at sometime read or listen to the scripture attest to what is most important, but people either disagree with what the Bible says is important or people ignore what the scripture says is most important.

An example of the scripture attesting to what is most important is as follows, "One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, 'Of all the commandments, which is the most important?' 'The most important one,' answered Jesus, is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'" Mark 12:28-30 (NIV) In other words Jesus Christ that is universally identified as the most important figure in the entire Bible (with the exception of God the Father) says that the most important commandment is to love God, and as a result the most important endeavor that a person could be engaged in is loving God.

Today many churches emphasize topics such as free will, salvation, and child baptism as being the most important subjects of the entire Bible, and other churches emphasize doctrine that they have plainly constructed to explain the Bible as if their doctrine is the most important element of understanding the scripture. Some churches will even practice memorization of scripture without attesting that one verse is more important than another, and as a result people will respond with verses based on situation without understanding any point associated with using the verses other than that the people feel that they are doing what they need to do. My point is that when people do not identify and believe what the Bible says is most important to be most important what happens is that people will often take what they themselves believe to be most important or what people tell them to be most important and thus use that as a bases for fitting the scripture into a large hierarchy of values that the scripture itself contradicts.

The most important element of the work of the apostles was to proclaim the gospel, and according to the scripture the gospel is the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Loving God with everything was the most important commandment, and in doing this proclaiming the gospel became an expression of loving God. The point is that the most important things in the scripture get expressed all the way down to the least important things. We thus should not add a bunch of little details together that are like disjointed teachings and thus sum them together, we should never manufacture theology to explain the scripture and then exclaim that theology to be the most important thing ever, and we should not decide what is important to us and then read the scripture according to our own wrong values.

If a person makes their top values to be what the scripture says is most important, then such a person will be able to easily say things that conform to scripture without even trying. If however a person has their top values in sharp contrast to the top most important elements of scripture, then such a person will always be fighting against scripture. Yet failing to recognize scripture to express what is important and then memorizing it anyway or using scripture as like a manual for developing theology that becomes viewed as more important than scripture itself makes for grave errors, and what I am saying is that people often flee personally embracing the highest values of scripture through either multiplying their Bible knowledge while avoiding the top values of scripture or people manufacture theology in order to avoid the top values that scripture attests to.

Today denominations emerge because church leaders disagree about what they find to be most important. The differences of values result in those values making themselves known through theological disagreements over subjects such as baptism practices, communion practices, and leadership practices. Overall, Christian doctrine is robbed through failing to recognize the top values of scripture, and by not adopting those top values as personal top values.