The Gathering Ray Barnett How to order Excerpt Why is church such a frustrating, ineffective experience for so many sincere believers? Why does the church seem to repel the very people that Jesus attracted? Why is it, that for all the dollars spent on buildings, clergy salaries, and denominational hierarchies, the institutional church seems to remain so ineffective and powerless to change our communities, let alone genuinely impact our own lives? The simple answer is that, for too many centuries, our institutional structures have been based on a lie. We have been sold the notion that the leadership hierarchies, the clergy system, and the auditorium-based cycles of Sunday meetings are what God instructs us to do in Scripture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Challenging each of these fallacies, THE GATHERING sets out the Biblical foundation of what God actually does say about being a local church. For believers who are walking away from the suffocations of the past, or who would like to, THE GATHERING lays out a pathway towards a truer, more Biblical model of the local church.