I' m sitting here laughing because I tried really hard to think of a way to word how I could say what I wanted to say without offending anyone. My first draft had a lot of deletions and rewrites because my word selections were not the best . Take # 2 and #3 were better, but still unacceptable. I thought I'd done sort of okay with " Bible-based and Bible-focused", although I did go back and stick in "completely". I get the impression you DO know what I'm saying, or not saying. To answer your question, no, I can't do so without getting denomination or theology specific, or even a bit offensive. I was trying to be nice!
My only real intent was to provoke thought and reflection about what these ideas mean.
If anyone, any of us who are Christians, believed our churches weren't faithful to Scripture, we wouldn't be party to it.
So, for example, in my own personal experience:
For the first eight years of my life my family attended a non-denominational church that simply called itself a "Bible Church". My family was forced to leave because of some rather unsavory circumstances. The net result was the ostracization of my mother and thus, my family, over things that were never true.
We eventually ended up joining a Foursquare church that met at the local YMCA before, a few years later, joining another Foursquare church the next town over. I have nothing bad to say about the people there, at least the early ones, some who came later tended to be a bit more difficult at least in my estimation. I ultimately stopped going when I was around 18, my mom passed away and my dad had been forced to move across state due to his job, and so I was living with my grandparents and had no means of transport for myself.
At this time I also began to do a lot of serious investigation and searching. Reading Scripture a lot more, looking into the history of Christianity. These things forced me to confront a lot of assumptions I had always had growing up, and forced me to rethink my own beliefs in order to be more closely aligned with what I was reading in Scripture. The most interesting thing to me was that much of what I was reading aligned not with any of the traditions I had been familiar with and part of up to that point; but with traditional Christian churches which I had largely been raised to consider unworth my time.
My wilderness period lasted the last couple of my teenage years and well into my early and mid-20's. I tried visiting and shopping for churches, but there were things that I couldn't reconcile. In some cases I simply was trying to make my dad happy by going to churches he thought I should go to, even though I couldn't agree with them on some very basic issues.
Ultimately I realized that I was Lutheran. It was quite by accident. Of all the churches I had been looking at, Lutheranism wasn't one of them. But, turns out, that's exactly what I had become without ever noticing it. But wasn't sure how to actually start doing anything about that, and so spent a number of years as what I describe as a "Crypto-Luthearn", i.e. a "secret Lutheran" (hence the CryptoLutheran I sign off with, something I began when I first joined Christian Forums back in 2010). But then, I finally just made the plunge. So there's no "crypto" part anymore.
I get the sentiment of where you are coming from. You don't want all this "stuff", you just want to follow Jesus and try and take Scripture seriously. But it's important to understand that's what all of us want. That's why we are where we are.
We aren't part of our denominations and communions because we are trying to blindly believe what our pastors or priests say; but because we are honestly, passionately, desiring to take Jesus seriously, and to live as faithful Christians in the world. And, because we are human, and because Christian history is complicated and messy, that also means that we have very major disagreements.
Nobody is "just" a Christian. That is, nobody is without their own biases, everyone is practicing the Christian religion through specific theological lenses, and maintaining certain traditions. That includes non-denominational churches--they have just as many peculiar and specific traditions and theological perspectives as any denominational church. The only real difference between a denominational church and a non-denominational church is the size of the church; denominations consist of multiple local churches and congregations, non-denominational churches consist of a single local church and/or congregation That's really the only difference.
There's no avoiding tradition, or avoiding having strong opinions on theological subjects that result in disagreement with other Christians. That's just life here in this world that we have to deal with. That, and tradition isn't an ugly word. Tradition is why we can call ourselves Christian in the first place--without anyone continuing to teach and confess the Christian faith down through the last two thousand years, none of us would be able to have heard the name of Jesus to begin with. Even the existence of the Bible itself is a tradition of the Church.
-CryptoLutheran
