I spent a lot of mornings sitting over my kitchen coffee, secretly panicking. I would look at the sheer mountain of religious expectations, corporate church politics, and multi-million-dollar institutional machinery, and feel an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. I knew my soul was flatly refusing to participate anymore, but because I was trained to be a polite, compliant Christian, I immediately internalized that exhaustion as a personal moral failure. It’s easy to whisper to ourselves that we are losing our faith—to assume that because we are angry at the institution, we must be falling away from God.
But I want to hand us both a massive, definitive permission slip today: We are not mad at God. We are just suffocating under the clutter of a system.
We aren’t walking away because we are lazy; we are walking away because we are heartbroken. We are upset because we were promised a sanctuary of radical love, but we found a country club obsessed with its own preservation. It is deeply disorienting to watch communities claim the name of Jesus while actively funding political power plays, building higher fences to keep out the marginalized, and treating victims of church trauma like disposable collateral damage. We are tired of the bait-and-switch. We are exhausted by a theology that cares more about protecting a pastor’s reputation or a building campaign than it does about the quiet suffering of the human beings sitting in the back pews.
And if you want to know how Jesus feels about that exact suffocating feeling, we need to take a walk through a dusty grainfield in first-century Palestine.
The Trap in the Wheat
In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 2, we find Jesus and his disciples walking through a field on the Sabbath. The disciples are tired, they’ve been traveling, and their stomachs are empty. So, as they walk, they do the most natural, human thing possible: they reach out, pluck a few heads of grain, rub them between their palms, and eat them.
It’s a tiny, insignificant moment of human survival. But lurking in the weeds are the Pharisees—the self-appointed gatekeepers of the religious status quo.
They don’t see tired human beings. They don’t see hunger. They only see the rulebook.
Technically, according to the hyper-vetted, endlessly layered religious clutter of their day, plucking a head of grain counted as “reaping.” Rubbing it in your hands counted as “threshing.” And doing either of those things on the Sabbath was a direct violation of the fine print.
They turn to Jesus, pointing their fingers at the muddy, hungry disciples, and demand: “Why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”
Notice what just happened here. The Sabbath was originally given to humanity by God as a radical, beautiful gift of protest against imperial burnout. It was a mandatory boundary line ensuring that slaves, animals, and tired workers could stop producing and just breathe. It was made for human flourishing.
But over centuries, the religious institution had done what institutions always do: they manicured the gift into a cage. They turned a day of mandatory rest into a high-stakes obstacle course of spiritual anxiety.
Jesus looks at these gatekeepers and drops a line that should shatter every corporate religious framework we’ve ever been handed:
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)
With one sentence, Jesus exposes the dark magic of all human religious systems. Systems almost always start as helpful containers—tools, rhythms, and spaces designed to serve human beings and help them connect with the Divine.
But over time, systems mutate. They become self-protective. The leadership gets obsessed with efficiency, control, and keeping the manicured lawn looking pristine. Eventually, the script flips completely: the system stops serving the people, and starts demanding that the people sacrifice their well-being to keep the system alive.
The simple community mutated into a corporate machine that requires your unpaid labor and financial compliance to survive.
The beautiful, ancient library of scripture mutated into a weaponized policy manual used to vet who is “in” and who is “out.”
The safety of corporate worship mutated into a high-performance stage where you are forced to perform certainty even when your heart is breaking.
Unfair religious control is what happens when we value the preservation of the fence line over the health of the flowers inside it. It is the human obsession with management, masquerading as divine authority.
Your Anger is Aligned
If you are currently sitting in the confusion of a shifting faith, looking at the institutional church and feeling a deep, burning irritation, hear this clearly: You aren’t backsliding. You are actually participating in the exact same holy indignation Jesus felt in that grainfield.
Jesus didn’t defend the system. He didn’t tell his disciples to swallow their hunger for the sake of institutional unity. He bypassed the gatekeepers entirely, reached into the dirt, and fed the people.
When you deconstruct, the terrifying lie whispered by the system is that if you leave the institution, you are leaving Christ. But Month 3 is about sorting the seeds. It’s about realizing that the heavy, suffocating weight that broke your spirit didn’t come from the heart of God—it came from the human need for control.
You don’t have to save the machinery. You don’t have to pretend the bindweed is a flower just to keep the peace.
Let the corporate structures crumble if they must. Let the forced certainties fly away in the wind. You aren’t losing your faith. You are just stepping out of the temple walls to follow the One who is already out in the mud, walking through the ruts, and offering you something real to eat.
Unfair religious control is what happens when we value the preservation of the fence line over the health of the flowers inside it.
The Greenhouse Preview
This Friday, we are moving from theory to practice in The Weed-Puller’s Lab. We are doing a Religious Clutter Archaeological Dig—a practical, step-by-step tool to help you take one religious expectation that still triggers shame in your body and trace it back to its actual historical and cultural context so you can finally leave it in the dirt. Plus, I’m sharing my personal list of "Clutter Filters" for reading the text without the institutional baggage. Upgrade today to get your hands dirty with us!
The Closing Question
What is one religious "rule" or expectation you’re carrying right now that feels like it’s choking your growth instead of helping you breathe?
Are there obstacles that prevent you from attending church in person? Hey there, I’m Amanda. I’m a mom to a gaggle of kids and a pastor at heart. I know there are a lot of things that make it challenging - if not impossible - to feel comfortable going to a church building. Streams of Grace is here to help! Streams is a trauma-informed, completely virtual church designed to make church accessible. Every Sunday we drop a short message reflecting on a theme from the Bible. You can watch it any time, listen to it as a podcast, or download and read the transcript. We are open and inclusive. So if you are in a season where you just don’t feel at home in a church but you want to grow closer to God, please swing over to streamsofgrace.life and join us.
