And Now for the Real Issue

I have been amazed by the chord my last post seemed to stike. I think so many of us are really at a point of crisis about the Church - I'm sure there have been hundreds of such periods of crisis in the past and our faith desperately needs them. Lets see this one through.
In the interest of that goal, allow to me take us a little deeper into the rabbit hole of Western Christianity:

"Literary critic Harold Bloom has claimed for years that Americans' intense emphasis on personalized contact with the divine exceeds the bounds of Christianity proper and tends towards Gnosticism."

This is a quote - from an old edition of Time magazine (Dec. 22, 2003, pg 49) - that punched me in the gut last week while I was out of town. The story was discussing the rising popularity of heretical Christian documents and seemingly dead off-shoots of the main-line church (Gnosticism, Marcionism etc.). There was some interesting discussion in the article surrounding some phrases like, "our accelerating narcissistic spirituality".
This is something that has really been on my mind, particularly since becoming more aware of the supposedly mass move out of church and into "personal priesthood": Is there a scriptural place for our catch cry - "My personal relationship with Christ/God"? Is our obsessively individual ideal - the ideal that, when it is really followed through, makes each of us into a tiny church unto ourselves - an ideal of Christ's? Should we really say, "Christianity is not a religion but a relationship"?

(I intend to look into this from a scriptural standpoint and I would love to know where to start.)

Away

I'm finally going to take a holiday. I'm going to try not to think for at least a few hours.

Thanks to everyone that has been adding to our conversation about the church. I'll be posting more about that later.

Peace
(most Christian of words - most difficult for Christians).