September 15, 2006
Move Over George Orwell
When I was in grade school our district decided to drop phonics and teach sight reading. Another fiasco in public education was the introduction of modern math. The church also goes through ‘new concepts’ and my science fiction plot for the future church goes like this: The church becomes just a clearing house for believers. As new believers come in the front door they’ll be farmed out and assimilated into self-sustaining small groups. The clergy’s theological backgrounds will lay dormant, because their role will be in organization and administrative matters. Members will accept that the Sunday worship service is not for their edification, but rather for the comfort of the prospective members. It will of course still be necessary to come together once a week to maintain the semblance of unity and to pay a temple tax to the mother church. I’m still working on the ending, but I think a small group splintering off to become ‘a church’ in itself has potential. Now, all I need to do is determine who the heroine is and who the villain is.
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Gail;
----Who the heroine is and who the villain is is quite simple (sometimes the really simple answers are those that escape us the most). Why did you query who the "heroine" is? Why not who the hero is? Of course Jesus is the hero. All things are broken in this temporal life, thank God for the concepts of death and end. Only Jesus will fix everything, only Jesus can fix anything.
----But I know that is not your context. The parable of the farmer whose field was sown with tares the night after he had sown it with wheat has always been the template through which I see the church. The first appearance of a church is that of an organization. And that organization is run by man. Man always has something goofy to bring into it because he is so goofed up. So the First Church of Appearance is goofed up too, because it is man's church.
----But our Lord's Bride is not goofed up. She never ceases to follow Jesus because He is the head over Her. She is faithful to Him, not in that She never makes a mistake, but like David, in that She always returns to Him from Her mistakes. She loves Him, She knows Him, and She follows Him, not man. Open the Word of God and present it to Her and She will agree with it, not deny it. She is the Heroine.
----She is the wheat in the field. She is the church that is the second apparent, the one that you must be a part of in order to see Her, and in order to know Jesus. She is the fellowship of brothers and sisters who do not command each others' lives, but who exemplify to one another Scriptural godliness by the nature of Christ lived in their lives. By that godliness the things they do for the Lord are done, not by church structure.
----When She has had enough of the First Church of Appearnace, She always comes out of it and becomes apparent herself. She did in the Reformation, She did in the Great Awakening, She has in numerous awakenings of local communities in various places throughout Her age. And She will again.
----Who is the villain? He is the men who want to confine her to a church structure organized by their wily visions. When they are as concerned about Scripturally defined godliness as they are with their own visions, when they are as busy exemplifying that godliness as they are with subjecting their brethren to their own church organizations, then they also have fellowship with the Heroine. The more they do so, the more the Heroine becomes first apparent, and the more church structure, organiztaion, and wily visions recede into the background.
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