This is O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
You must continue to grow—to be transformed from the inside out by Heavenly thinking via conversational prayer, daily Bible exposure, and justice in your routine lifestyle. If you don’t continue to grow, you will bonsai.
When one crab tries to escape, other “crabs in the pot” oppress him. When someone has good ideas, others feel intimidated and group attack with stinkin’ thinkin’ until that person stops growing and maintains a mediocre equilibrium with whatever group he runs with. Culture often opposes the nourishment we need.
Many Christians bonsai when they become dependent on religious buildings and systems for socializing and growth. The inescapable tendency toward group think of any group is one of many dangers, also present in regular, routine, recurring, liturgical, predictable structures of so-called “Christian fellowship”. Authentic Christian growth is organic, which, though characteristic of its kind, is also ordered by unpredictable chaos. No two leaves are or ever have been or ever will be identical, yet every leaf of a kind is known by its kind. Religious structures, by contrast, are small, rigid, and thereby stunt growth.
About the turn of the millennium, many Christians bored with bonsai “Churchianity” looked to find new ideas and inspiration anywhere they could. A kind of “Hippie” movement swept through Christian subculture, at which time many Christians abandoned their moral compasses because “morals” were the theme of mundane Churchianity. Everything decayed from there.
But, this problem was never limited to the Christian worldview. Growth nourished by the Creator is necessary for any creature who wants an organic, healthy, flourishing life. The same is true of business, family, and politics. For Conservatives in America, if they don’t review and ponder the theories, ideas, principles, and philosophies that keep a country from spiraling into “bread, circuses, and entertainment”—as befell Rome—they eventually start thinking that charitable giving is the source of revenue and their nation suffocates by way of bankruptcy.
If we don’t evaluate and treasure the basic procedures that propel us into continuing who we are, we enter “manager-theoretician” mode, and then collapse, whether economically, personally, politically, or morally.
1 Samuel 2:26, Psalm 92:12-14, Luke 17:5, Colossians 1:9-10, Hebrews 6:1, 2 Peter 3:18