So many of us are disillusioned with church. We want to love Jesus but we can’t stand what we are being told. The more we read of the Gospel the more we feel that church isn’t where we will see it lived out.

We’re angry. We feel duped. We feel deceived. We feel like we have wasted years of our lives in the service of an institution, a machine, rather than a living God.

We feel that we have been controlled and manipulated, not to shape us into stronger members of the Body of Christ, but to make us more docile and compliant.

We are grieving. We love Jesus, and we feel that the only route we have been offered to find Him has taken us far away from Him.

So we leave church. We’ve left with fear and trembling. We’ve left because we feel that to stay is to get even further away from what we know to be true.

There are many of us.

We are slowly finding each other, the misfits, the outcasts. Some of us left church of our own accord, some of us were asked to leave.

But we still need community.

Remember how Jesus says that if two or more are gathered in his name, he is there? He says nothing about doing it on your own. Jesus came to gather up all the lost sheep, the lost crumbs, the lost coins. He came to unite us. So it is important for us to join together.

There are virtual communities of us, who find each other on social websites under the banner of “Progressive Christian.” A lot of us are sad that there has to be a way of separating us from “those” people who say they are Christian but use it as a social club, or as a club to attack anyone who isn’t them. Can’t we all get along? That is what Jesus wanted – for us to join together. But we don’t feel we can be silent anymore in denominations that are anti- any of God’s children. We don’t feel we can be silent when our faith is more interested in stopping gay people from being married than stopping children from starving. Women’s reproductive rights are important, but environmental destruction is more important. We are being distracted as to what the important issues really are.

We feel that our faith has been hijacked. We feel that the wool is being pulled over our eyes. We feel that we are being sold a bill of goods that we know to be bad. We feel that we are expected to be quiet little sheep.

We need to take time to grieve. And then we need to move forward.

We are angry at how many people are being mislead. This is not just by the prosperity preachers. It is not just by the ministers who preach hate and intolerance. It is even by the liberal churches who welcome everybody. I feel that we have been lulled into a false sense of security, and we’ve given up our own power. We’ve forgotten how to follow Jesus when we follow others. When we put our faith and our trust in authority figures and in the establishment, rather than in Jesus we will always be mislead.

We’ve not been taught how to hear from God. We’ve not been taught to trust that still small voice. We’ve been put down and ignored. We are embarrassed to talk about God in church. We have been told that we are crazy.

We know we aren’t.

We are starting to think that we’ve been ignored and mistreated and abused and talked down to enough. We are realizing that the church hasn’t been a good parent to us. We are divorcing ourselves from this dysfunctional family, and going out on our own.