Churchianity is a religion, and it is all around us. It speaks the language of Christianity and looks like it in many respects, but it is a corruption of the real thing, and a dangerous one at that.

I write from Nigeria, so I speak from the expressions of this faith in my country. Perhaps it won’t be too different in yours as well.

The problems with Churchianity are numerous. At the centre is the church, viewed as a sanctuary or temple, with the senior pastor as the inerrant High Priest and Divine Mouthpiece.

It speaks of sin, salvation, Jesus, God, and heaven but has such watered-down understandings of the terms. It revers the Bible but reads it like a religious manual and barely gets the narrative. It neither knows how the book came about nor does it care. It is a received faith which brooks no questions and is impatient with doubt.

Churchianity does have a sense of community, but it is shallow. It’s communion is social; like a club where you get together with members to chat, ‘worship’, and sometimes dine, then you go home alone to your life—whatever it is.

It has a hope, a hope of going away from a troubling, meaningless world, to go and spend eternity singing with angels and living in luxury. By the way, that world of pleasure and prosperity begins now, from the moment you ‘give your life to Christ’. It’s really why you come to him anyway. In Churchianity, Christ is a means to an end.

Churchianity creates an illusion of life. It makes one comfortable on the false assumption of a relationship with God. Churchianity can provide grounding for a moral and respectable life, but like Christ said to the Pharisees, it leaves us as whitewashed tombs only filled with inner rottenness. It is not just short of true faith; it is a false faith which is oriented around man rather than God.

Christianity is the truth about reality understood as a flow in three (or four) phases of Creation, Fall and Redemption (and Restoration). At the centre and origin is God, a spirit, loving, holy, and powerful, who has absolute control over all things and wisely directs it according to his desire.

True Christianity stands on a cosmic creation and a comprehensive redemption. It truly understands that sin lies in not merely in acts of ungodliness but in the disposition of the heart. As such, every individual, however moral, bears the same problem. And it is a defect which affects everything we do.

But through Christ God is renewing all things and transforming his universe. We are reconciled to God through faith in Jesus alone. Such a faith must issue in a life of holiness, but perceived holiness or outward godliness is never the basis of a person’s salvation. There is a holy community formed by the Spirit and ruled by God’s word. This new community witnesses to Jesus in its life and it’s preaching.

Like the above, Biblical Christianity has a hope. It is a victorious hope, a confident expectation that the Jesus who has ascended will return to judge the living and the dead, he will wipe away every sin, pain, and corruption, and he will make all things new.

This truth, this life, and this hope directs not just how we pray, but how we work. It directs how we live with others and informs the kind of society we build.

This faith, Biblical Christianity, has shaped the modern world for 2,000 years. And it is to this faith, not it’s counterfeit, we must hold on for the future.