---

i kissed civil religion goodbye
bringing the church back home
dan trotter

At the University of South Carolina in the radical early seventies, I almost lost my faith, and then I found it, courtesy of a small group of misfitted Jesus people radicals. It was through them that I learned about radical, biblical, New Testament house church Christianity. That oasis of heaven in the midst of a radical leftist hell is something that marked me for life. The exhilarating experience of church life in the midst of a radically antichristian culture, and reading Watchman Nee’s Normal Christian Church Life, set me on a course from which I have not deviated. I want to know the church as it was in Jesus’ mind when he established it, and commissioned his apostles to plant it.

Now I am getting old, and I am no longer thrilled about America. It is pagan to its roots. Its media, its universities and colleges, its think tanks, its political parties, its businesses, its entertainment and popular culture, its public schools, and worst of all, its church institutions (for the most part) are apostate. When its politicians incessantly invoke “Gawd,” I try to restrain the nausea.

I looked to the conservative church to fight the rot, but the church was not there for me. The stifling ecclesiastical bureaucracies, the preening professionalism of its pastorate, its shallowness, its cowardly compromises, and in many cases, its downright immorality left me looking elsewhere....