Christian Spiritual Homelessness

Many Americans today, including youth, experience a sense of alienation, of spiritual homelessness in the midst of tremendous material prosperity accreting to the rich. Traditional Christian Churches have largely failed the challenge of evolving from a feudalism mirroring hierarchical structure historical established to function to enrich a separate and unequal clergy.

Even in today's troubled economy more than 13% of Americans relocate annually in search of opportunity. With the change of city and state they too often find a franchise and television neo-realism providing their roots to philosophy and faith. The displaced or dispossessed experience, hip hop, football and pop shows as a temporal home beside their car.
Post-modern spiritual homelessness has developed in America for a nation trained by an impersonal media to rave and consume. Seventy-five percent of the economy is said to rely on consumerism. More that 35% of the workforce is employed in financial related services. More than a quarter of all rental properties in the United States are foreign owned and multi-national corporations made a joke of national competitiveness. Social anomie grows amidst high unemployment and millions of illegal alien immigrant displacement workers.

Churches too often are drive in tithing centers for people with SUVs to bring their children to for moral refuge if not true faith. Christians are second rated spectators in churches that forget their name and contribution when they leave town to search for a job.

Unequal network financial advantages pervasive today allow some to earn several lifetimes’ earnings with quick currency trading, and others labor if able to find work for what amounts to a fraction of the interest earned each day by non-workers with capital advantage. The Book of Deuteronomy 25 verses 13 through 16 warns against this;

13 “You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a heavy and a light. 14 You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small. 15 You shall have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure, that your days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For all who do such things, all who behave unrighteously, are an abomination to the LORD your God.

Spiritual homelessness in the United States brought several generations to search for meaning in an increasingly meaningless social environment. Meaning in consumerism without rational regarding to environmental consequences, social injustice and national dissipation cannot replace an activist priesthood of Christian believers wherein a Church may have a wise bishop and a congregation of priests sharing the tasks and tithing as peers more or less in a structured context.

Spiritual homeless may be remedied with a spiritual home generally available for Christian in a nationwide priesthood of believers. A structured Christian social welfare safety net should be created with a network of emergency saving (perhaps $3000 dollars), employment and service credit banks, medical help from members and a lifetime record of church attendance and participation prevents the erasure of a ‘laity’ and their work.

Youth in America should know that they really aren’t alone, as should everyone else, as Christian outsiders looking in toward isolated SUV congregations of the middle class that at best may consider it generous to cast some charity toward the spiritually homeless. Christian churches must be as interested in providing structured, material emergency support for every Christian account as well as that of a hierarchical clergy.

The Apostle Paul believed that Deuteronomy 25:4 “4 “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” meant that a preacher should receive sustenance for his Christian work. That may be so; however it does not imply that an exclusive priesthood was best. At most a priesthood of believers should have beginner, intermediate and elder status in assembly with roles within the sphere of competence of each. Christians should be encouraged to mature and welcome to participate fully in worship service, perhaps rotating roles. As every Christian is a priest, the absence of any one would be meaningful. The national church would be a real spiritual home capable of transcending the national chaos anomie and spiritual homelessness that is a derivative of the development of post-modern American society.

http://www.providentplan.com/831/tithing-in-the-bible-malachi-38-12/
http://www.intothelight.org/tithing.asp
http://www.helium.com/items/1627919-deciding-whether-tithing-should-be-based-on-gross-income-or-net

We may learn that today’s clergy are overpaid by 3000% according to the pay scale of the book of Deuteronomy. The faithful were to save ten percent of their annual produce and bring it to a sacred spot to feast once a year to honor God. In such practice of saving poverty would be avoided. Every third year the 10% was to be given to widows, orphans and materially non-productive priests. Thus the clergy were to receive 1/3rd of ten percent of the faithful’s income every third year.

Today’s priesthood of believers could save their material abundance and annual invest it in church projects honoring God from which they personally share the benefit.

Creating a practical social organization-an ecclesiastical organization-that realistically offers a national spiritual home for all Christians is no simple task. Probably it would require several prominent hierarchical priests supporting publically the innovation of such a church. The need for a priesthood of believers is plain and possible in an era of universal literacy; the unwillingness of those earning a comfortable living from the present structure is also hard to change. Jesus said ;

(Matthew 7-12) “7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? 11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! 12 Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

One must believe that the better perfect of the spiritual church of Jesus Christ will in time advance.