Go home. Stay home. You’re at church too much. Take some payback and take care of yourself. Take a sabbath from church.

Repeating that: Take a sabbath from church. Yes, a sabbath. God wants you to enjoy him, life, other people, maybe another church. He wants you to get your sour, guilt-ridden, manipulated, beaten down face out of that circus and save yourself.

Life will go on at church without you. If it’s a healthy church, they will support whatever will make you a better Christian. If it’s a sick church with no appreciation for what dealing with them is doing to you, attempting to explain your time away is waste of time anyway. When you return to being somewhat balanced and normal, you can explain it them, and suggest they do the same.

Find another church, or no church, or several churches. Take enough time off to find your boundaries. Stay away till that voice in your head that has all those little tapes running all the time goes away. You aren’t a bad Christian. You aren’t being selfish. You aren’t a bad witness. You aren’t letting people down. You are being a steward or your life and talents. You are answering to God, not one of his salesman.

Don’t waste this sabbath. Don’t become a worse mess. Just do it so you can remember where the line between yourself and church is. It’s there, trust me. When you promised to be a faithful member, you didn’t agree to blow yourself, your family and your faith up in the cause of a bigger megachurch or 40 Weeks of Purpose.

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Take a sabbath from church jobs, church guilt trips, church gossip, church politics and church excuses. Enjoy God without knowing everything about what’s going on in the church and in everyone’s life. Get out of the “prayer chains” that spread church gossip, and pray for your church from a distance.

In fact, consider if you don’t need to be somewhere that understands the sabbath principle correctly; where the congregation gathers for good news, teaching and encouragement, not to keep the empire running. A church where doing nothing several nights a week is exactly the right thing to do. Think about going smaller, with less going on and all kinds of time to meet the lost, cook for them, drink with them and bowl with them. If that would scandalize your current church, it’s an even better reason to look elsewhere permanently.

Am I being too extreme? No. The current church growth, church guilt, megachurch wannabe mentality is damaging thousands and Christians. It’s messing up families and stealing years of time that isn’t coming back. It’s fostering codependency with sick church leaders who need help themselves.

God isn’t impressed. He didn’t sign on to this, and he isn’t requiring you to live like this.