The carnal believers, inexperienced themselves at the difficulty and cost of discipleship, then hold these clergy to unreal expectations and ask them to fulfill an impossible role. This breeds a whole cycle of unhealthiness and co-dependency in themselves and those they ask to lead them. A growing number of believers in churches that offer such poor example of radical commitment and little opportunity for genuine discipleship, are no longer satisfied within those constraints. I think we all agree that folks in a building that say they are a church, are a church. It's church, a gathering of saints.
Folks meeting in a home are a church.
I am coming to think that how we perceive the church will open or close doors to us of being the church together. Most of us know that instinctively. What we say will always be interpreted by what we do, either reinforcing what we say, or making it hollow and repulsive in hypocrisy. More, what we do and who we become inside is the message itself oftentimes. It was in being with Jesus that the disciples were transformed over time.