AnalysisTyler Hummel | October 29, 2025
A couple years ago, when I first moved to Wisconsin, I joined a local megachurch Bible study that wasn’t attached to my church. Despite attending a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation, I found Wisconsin was generally bereft of young folks eager to spend time together, with most local Lutheran and Episcopal parishes skewing smaller and older.
Swallowing my pride, I joined the Bible study and learned the woman leading was a former Dutch Calvinist. Curious, I asked why she’d left her creedal tradition, and she gave me an answer that’s become all too common in the evangelical world: “I’m just a Christian!”
In a sense, this is a very mature conclusion. There is a sad spiritual immaturity in the very existence of denominations. The post-Reformation schisms, bitter rivalries between fundamentalists and modernists, and the explosion of denominations in Protestant churches are scandalous, often driven by bitterness and church drama. They’re confusing, and they often spread confusion among non-Christians as to what Christians believe when two churches cannot agree on something essential.
This evangelical desire to cut past denominational nonsense is understandable, even laudable.
However, as a high churchman who spends his time with Lutherans and Anglicans, I find this instinct addresses the problem in the wrong way. In its effort to avoid enforcing unity through a single dogmatic standard in the ecclesiastical manner of the Catholics, megachurch ecclesiology unites by abolishing standards. Instead of trying to answer deeper questions about theology, it is a big-tent approach to theology that tries to push the boundaries of Christianity outward to fit everybody.
Practically speaking, though, this approach has served to push Protestants away from their stuffy liturgical traditions and hymnals. It has become a means of turning houses of worship into Baptist-lite churches with contemporary worship music as a means of avoiding distinctives. These congregations end up enforcing an unstated creedal standard in place of formal ones.
“Finding the truth in Christianity often is harder than it seems.”
When I ask my friends pointed questions about orthodox teachings and dogmas within my tradition, I most often am met with a shrug by evangelicals who want to be “just Christian.”
Finding the truth in Christianity often is harder than it seems. Because of the complexity of the Scriptures and the confusion of conflicting traditions, the average Christian often is obliged to become a lay scholar and be prepared to defend their faith beyond what is practical for an average working-class person.
Because of this, many Christians get stuck in the shallow end of the pool.
It’s common for Christians to church-hop over aesthetic issues with a church, or to follow one’s every fleeting anxiety from one church to the next. Maybe the coffee tastes bad, or the worship band isn’t entertaining. Maybe that church isn’t fulfilling us, and the green looks just a little bit greener at the megachurch down the street.
It cuts to the core of a problem with the way many spiritually thirsty people engage with their churches in the first place. I can’t tell you how many perpetually unhappy young men I’ve met whose spiritual journey looks like a game of checkers. In short order, they’re Baptist, then Presbyterian, then Anglican, then Catholic, then Orthodox, and then they’re lecturing you about why vernacular mass is a modernist heresy.
The reality, though, is less profound. Every time they encountered a minor issue they didn’t like, they ascended another step on the proverbial ladder until they couldn’t go any higher. And when that last church disappointed them, they responded by radicalizing and condemning the church authorities for being compromised and insufficient.
Their spiritual immaturity only served to give them a surface-level engagement with the churches they visited.
When I see young men constantly church hopping, I start to fear there is a deeper issue keeping them from finding a way to soothe their souls. In reality, they lack trust. They’re ecclesiologically lost and disappointed in the fallen world.
I won’t pretend the differences between these churches don’t matter. Dogma and truth are important. Knowing who God truly is and how to worship and obey God can mean the difference between salvation and perdition. However, knowledge can be a temptation toward confusion. It’s all too difficult to shut down the little questioning voice in our heads that makes us doubt and wander.
“One of the core problems of the Christian life is the sublimation of the will to that of Christ.”
One of the core problems of the Christian life is the sublimation of the will to that of Christ. This can come with struggling to accept core church teachings, struggling with difficult sins or merely struggling to calm one’s spirit. Often, this sublimation comes in ways we don’t expect. In any case, it’s always easier to look at other people and criticize the specks in their eyes.
The reality is, absent major issues like corruption or error, it often is better for us to spend these moments of uncertainty and anxiety by digging in rather than seeking answers. The answer might just be that we aren’t as communally engaged as we need to be in the daily grind of the Christian life.
As the religious scholar Andrew M. Henry once said of Zen Buddhism, there is a tendency in that religion for those seeking enlightenment to individualize their faith and view faith as a personal journey, when the reality is our communal experience is vital to spiritual growth. Those who seek self-discovery often are better off seeking “embodied practices” through community connection. As he puts it, “Sometimes killing the ego looks like washing dishes at the local temple.”
I’m writing this now because my grandfather passed away last month after a lengthy battle with pulmonary fibrosis. I disagreed tremendously with my late grandfather’s theology. We were two men at odds theologically. I am a sacramentalist, and he was a fundamentalist. He joked it was a shame only Baptists got into heaven. However, I’ve always admired his faith. My earliest memories of my faith were my grandparents sitting me down to read Scripture on the couch, against the wishes of a squirmy, restless little kid.
But as I look back on his life, I can’t help but admit he was a better Christian than I. Despite our differences, I continue to look to my grandparents, who rarely strayed from their faith from their adolescence until their dying day. Their minds always were focused on the life of the church, volunteering to mow the church lawn, teaching their children to memorize Scripture, playing the organ, leading Bible studies and raising money for missionaries. Their faith didn’t stop at the door. It lived and grew through their actions.
Their lesson is that there is a humility in looking spiritually inward rather than outward. There always is the possibility that we have backed the wrong horse and need a change. Churches can be sickly, abusive and wrong. But we’re also sinners. It takes a great deal of intellect and honesty to say we’re wrong without merely indulging our aesthetic preferences. It also takes a lot of humility to say, “This church is not one I prefer, but it is producing fruit.”
Coming to know the fullness of Christ and his truth is difficult, and knowledge often is a trap for the humility we need to live out the Christian life. There is more humility in washing dishes at the church potluck than poring over the collections of Calvin and Aquinas to silence our wandering hearts.
Tyler Hummel
Tyler Hummel is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.
(123rf.com)
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