When Jesus prayed,
“Your kingdom come,”
He wasn’t talking
About Christendom
Where church and state
Compelled all to hum
In obligatory
Unison.

Finding passionate, heart-felt, Spirit-led Christianity is sometimes like finding Waldo. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Where in Christendom is the Christian?”

To call the world today “post-Christian” is a misnomer. The world has never been Christian. Jesus told His followers, “You do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.”

The world of Christendom was never a “Christian world.” It was a world of compulsion and coercion that was full of obligatory religious acts. It frequently persecuted people who seriously tried to follow and obey the risen Jesus.

When Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world, He turned them down. Christendom, however, embraced and glorified political power. Christendom, religious authoritarianism set in motion by Emperor Constantine’s use of Christianity for political purposes, is a great Christian heresy that binds church and state together.

When you examine history, you see that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was not the Lord of Christendom and its compulsion, conflicts, cruelty, wars, and authoritarianism. When setting Christendom into motion, Constantine declared the Cross a sign of military conquest, not the act of God’s love.

Christendom tried to prevent people from having direct access to Scripture. We continue to see the remnants of that today when church members are trained to spend more time listening to sermons than reading the Bible for themselves.

For more than a thousand years, people born in church-and-state lands, were baptized as infants and declared Christians by birth. I grew up in the final days of Christendom when people were still assumed to be Christians because of their nationality.

In the aftermath of Christendom, the concept of church has splintered into thousands of divisions pointing out each other’s errors. Martin Luther set in motion a centuries-long process of fracturing and dismantling the authoritarian control of Christendom, that continues to this day and is clearing the way for Spirit-led Christianity.

For many centuries Christendom replaced early Christianity. It still lingers today. The body of Christ urgently needs to be an alternative town hall meeting, with God’s eternal perspective, not a partner in human government and manipulative control.

Having a relationship with the living Jesus is eternal. Church attendance only last about an hour.