Church hopping: Is it morally/spiritually right to change your church/religion?
- Vicent Nemeyimana
- January 28, 2017
- Uncategorized
What is a church? It is simply a congregation of people who believe in Jesus Christ. And what is church hopping? It is a condition or a situation where by a person is fond of moving from one church to another. Simply, it is changing churches. For example, leaving protestant church and then join Baptist Church or Roman Catholic Church. Usually, many people do not know exactly what God says about this and somehow we find ourselves referring to such people who change churches as sinners and which could be true in some situations. So what exactly is good or bad about changing your current church and joining another one?
At least, even junior Christians know that we won’t go to heaven because of our churches but our faith. While this is true, it is unwise to pretend that the church has little, if not nothing, to do with our faith (after all, it is the faith that your church preaches that you end up believing in). This means if you choose a wrong church, you may end up with wrong faith. For this reason, choosing a church is as important as choosing your drugs.
But we all know that it may not be that easy to tell that this church or that one is wrong or correct. Time, a long time is needed to discern between the faithfulness of these churches. For this reason, it is possible that after a long time of attendance in a certain church, you may need to change in case you later realize that the church is a wrong one. In this case, you are doing the right thing. Next time you need to be slow and sure before you join another one. But if it happens and you make a mistake again, do not fear to change. Sometimes, churches are right and following God’s word from the beginning and then change later housing so many other items and services that may seem contradicting. In case someone is convinced that this is destroying his faith, then changing to another church is a good choice.
The challenge is when people keep changing churches due to self interests like when the church is against bad manners that the person still wants to keep, or this person is avoiding responsibility and being followed up by other church members, or he is following richness, miracles, kind of people like girls or boys or politicians and other selfish reasons. In these cases, the person could be doing wrong. Some people may change their places of worship simply because their expectations were not met. This is not a problem in itself unless the expectations were wrong ones. Oh let us elaborate more.
Since we both know that what defines God’s kingdom is more than spiritual needs only; it is also possible that one can change to another church to find answers to other life’s questions in case the other church was simply neglecting to deliver such services to her congregation. This is also okay. Faith is not just in words, the church should be able to help people in all important aspects of life. So changing churches in search of these other benefits may not be dangerous depending on the real motive behind. After all, the bible emphasizes that a right religion should take care of the needy and orphans. Of course, there is a difference between a religion and church, but the message is the same. A church or religion that shows no interest in its followers’ life issues is not helpful.
Finally, it is not a sin to change your church and join another one as long as your motive is good and born out of your conscience. We love you so much
The Complete You Ministry, www.nemvicx.blogspot.com
