In this book we will be looking mostly at the institutional church - the relationship that believers have with it and its compatibility with the Kingdom of God as revealed in the Scriptures. We will be asking if, over the past 1700 years, the traditions of men have gradually usurped the authority of the Bible. We will seek to understand why discussions about the problems that exist within institutional christendom generate such passion, fear and hostility. We will look at why people seem so motivated and anxious to defend the system. Is this similar to the passion that Jesus demonstrated for His Father's Temple when He cast out the money changers? Or is it because people have invested so much of their lives and security in these structures?

We will take an in-depth look at what church is. We will ask what aspects of church are unchangeable, what are eternal and what are culturally defined? At what point do structures and practices cease to be helpful and instead become destructive? We will try to identify some of satan's tactics for deceiving believers and ask if indeed much of what passes as Christianity is in fact a subtle counterfeit engineered by the Prince of Lies.

These are complex questions that cannot be answered by one-line statements. Unfortunately, the nature of a book is that we can discuss only one issue at a time, which may require us to make assumptions about something that is discussed in more depth later on. Many of the comments that I have received, have been that some statements appear to be unsupported by facts. In most of these cases the supporting evidence has in fact been presented later on in the book. It is my suggestion that you read this book twice, once fairly quickly to get an overview of the major themes, and then again in more detail to understand the picture that the book seeks to paint. This book is not intended to be a theological treatise in which we laboriously cross every "t" and dot every "i", but rather to prompt you, like the Bereans (Acts 17:11), to examine the Scriptures even more thoroughly for yourself to see if what we say is indeed true.

Please click the link below to view our main site: