A PATH TO A RENEWED CHURCH

No, we do not intend to have a New Church. The Catholic Church is the body of the Lord, it's his presence on earth. It is just that it seems to need to go back to the essentials, those that we find in the Bible: a loving and caring community based on the practice of the teachings of the apostles (the scripture). the Fathers of the Church, the Councils (Vat. 2), the Pope's guidings, and the sacraments. 

What we find now is a Church that tríes to be faithful to the Lord in the participation in the sacraments and in the correct beliefs but not in their praxis. Not in the real practice of the main commandment: “In this they will know that you are my disciples: if you love one another”, (John 13, 35) because, how could you love someone you don’t know? Those are empty words. 

We see  Catholics have been taught the gospel in a wrong way. The doctrine and the sacraments are intact, but the way we live them has turned empty as empty have turned words like love and charity, humility, father, brother, spiritual father. They mean nothing anymore. We were taught to go to mass on Sundays, maybe every day, to baptize our kids and bring them to First Comunión and Confirmation and… well, that’s more or less it. Oh yes, and getting married through the Church. If we do that we are allowed to live in the world for the world and according to the world’s values, just as anyone else, Christian or not Christian. And that is false.

Let’s see then what we are missing and what the Bible has for us:

1. When Christ called his disciples he called them to be fishers of men. Let’s read it: “And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon, called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. And he said unto them: follow me, and I will make you fishers of men”. Yes, we think that this is a universal call made through Peter and Andrew to all of us. The call to follow Jesus and be turned into fishers of men. ALL the disciples. 
2. The first church was a community of friends around Jesus, not a group of unknown people seating at each other’s side in the temple on Sundays. Even more, when Christ is told that his mother and brothers are looking for him, what he answered was that his mother, brothers and sisters (his family) are those “who do the will of God” (Mc. 3, 35) meaning his disciples. He was not rejecting his family, but teaching us that the bonds between his disciples must be stronger even than those we have with our blood families. A real bond where we know and love each one personally because, how can we love someone we don’t know? The church is meant to be a real community with knowledge of each other and bonds stronger than the blood family. A real community, not this parochial community where we sit at mass at the side of people you see each Sunday but who you don’t even know their names. People who don’t even say hello to their fellow parishioners. The priest insists on loving people he doesn’t know, who live in houses he has never seen, and whose cares and problems are of no interest to him.
3. The church should be a community where all of its members have been made by baptism as priests, prophets, and kings, and where each of them holds a ministry in the church, understanding church not as the temple, but as the living rocks who conform the real temple of Christ, the ecclesía, the gathering of those summoned, the disciples of Christ where some are apostles, yes, bishops, priests, and deacons, but others still are prophets, and yet OTHERS, not the same, evangelists, pastors and teachers of the faith (Ef 4, 11). You see? All of us Christian’s are not only called to be sheep but to be prophets or evangelists or pastors or teachers, being the apostles the head of this ministerial community, “for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Ef 4, 12) “from whom the whole body is filled, joined together and compacted by that which every joint (ministry) supplies…” (Ef 4, 16).
4. This community built around Jesus should imitate the first Christian’s life as we see it in Acts 2, 42: “…and they continued steadfastly in the apostles doctrine (the Bible, the tradition of the Church) and fellowship (friendship amongst the brothers, all of them) in the breaking of the bread (Eucharist and sacraments) and in the prayers”. You see? There is a great difference between this type of community and the one we have in parishes where unknown people go to mass in the same temple.
5. When new people entered the church, they didn’t enter a building made of bricks. No. They entered through baptism into a community of real love and mercy that would now give them the fellowship they need, a fellowship that is to replace the false fellowship of the world, and teach them through this fellowship Christ’s path. It is this community who will help them discern and exercise their charisms and ministries. A real community is a group of loving friends that are open to accepting a new member, a new disciple, a new brother, and helping him grow within the community “into a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ef. 4, 13].