Whatever religious congregations men may form henceforth in the name of the true God must be for their own sakes and not to take charge of religion.

The history of Christianity, with its encrustation and suffocation in dogmas and usages, its dire persecutions of the faithful by the unfaithful, its desiccation and its unlovely decay, its invasion by robes and rites and all the tricks and vices of the Pharisees whom Christ detested and denounced, is full of warning against the dangers of a church.  Organisation is an excellent thing for the material needs of men, for the draining of towns, the marshalling of traffic, the collecting of eggs, and the carrying of letters, the distribution of bread, the notification of measles, for hygiene and economics and suchlike affairs.  The better we organise such things, the freer and better equipped we leave men’s minds for nobler purposes, for those adventures and experiments towards God’s purpose which are the reality of life.  But all organisations must be watched, for whatever is organised can be “captured” and misused.  Repentance, moreover, is the beginning and essential of the religious life, and organisations (acting through their secretaries and officials) never repent.  God deals only with the individual for the individual’s surrender.  He takes no cognisance of committees.

Those who are most alive to the realities of living religion are most mistrustful of this congregating tendency.  To gather together is to purchase a benefit at the price of a greater loss, to strengthen one’s sense of brotherhood by excluding the majority of mankind.  Before you know where you are you will have exchanged the spirit of God for esprit de corps.  You will have reinvented the symbol; you will have begun to keep anniversaries and establish sacramental ceremonies.  The disposition to form cliques and exclude and conspire against unlike people is all too strong in humanity, to permit of its formal encouragement.  Even such organisation as is implied by a creed is to be avoided, for all living faith coagulates as you phrase it.  In this book I have not given so much as a definite name to the faith of the true God.  Organisation for worship and collective exaltation also, it may be urged, is of little manifest good.  You cannot appoint beforehand a time and place for God to irradiate your soul.

All these are very valid objections to the church-forming disposition.

4.  Organisations under god

Yet still this leaves many dissatisfied.  They want to shout out about
God.  They want to share this great thing with all mankind.

Why should they not shout and share?

Let them express all that they desire to express in their own fashion by themselves or grouped with their friends as they will.  Let them shout chorally if they are so disposed.  Let them work in a gang if so they can work the better.  But let them guard themselves against the idea that they can have God particularly or exclusively with them in any such undertaking.  Or that so they can express God rather than themselves.