August 15, 2007
On the Same Page
The early New Testament churches each had different problems, issues and personalities. However today’s churches and denominations are beginning to look alike because they’re all on the same page and reading the same how-to-books. I suspect there’s not a church bookshelf (pastor’s office, library, etc.) in America that doesn’t have at least one copy of the Purpose Driven Church. By embracing and subscribing to the techniques of others, our churches have lost their claim of independence and being a Spirit Driven Church. I think I'd feel a lot less cloned if leaders followed Paul’s example to avoid building on another’s foundation (Ro 15:20).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----As just a note of perspective on this problem, consider two factors. The First Century church was not an organization, and in it was no priesthood function of one man to another by which God’s message would become a vocabulary of mental terms. With the exception of I & II Timothy and Titus, the epistles of instruction were not written to the leaders of the church’s instructing them about the cultural characteristics, objectives, and theological understandings that must become the elements of the church. Nor did the epistles instruct the leaders on how to operate a church budget, elect elders, build buildings, and develop programs. From the education at the seminaries for the handling of the information and ideologies of the new life to the development of such into programs and the establishment of mission statements, church organization is all man’s growth upon the Lord’s body. Not that all of it is entirely bad, but that it is imperative to know and understand none of it to be entirely required by the Word or completely good. Church organization is the way man came to handle the things of God. And for all its benefit, it has contributed also detriment. This little truth is easy to see in the fact that the epistles were written to the people who were the church about their relationships to the Lord. I & II Timothy and Titus, which do instruct church leaders, do so without turning the church leaders into some sort of employed staff to capture the imaginations, talents, efforts, and funds of the people for the service of goals established by an organization. The church is rather the meeting of all those who serve the Lord in their relationships with Him. That meeting is implied in the Word as benefiting the strength and understanding of the people, the girding of their faith, the mentoring of their behaviors, and the commingling of their common worship and joys.
Yet, in man’s tendency to arrogate in all he does, there are the select few who have succeeded, through the generations, in standing above all the brethren and acting as some sort of liaison between them and the image of church portrayed to them. They make themselves to be the handlers of the deeper knowledge, the understanders of the deeper truths, the knowers of the subtleties of God’s will for the people. They are those who receive the vision dictating the people’s worship experiences and their spiritually perceived joint efforts for the Lord. They are the ones who choose the doctrinal subtleties that will be allowed or will be dismissed among the people.
And they pass all of this around, of course, and necessarily, by use of language. The problem with language is that meanings of words are not intricately precise from one person to another. This applies to meanings of theological terms as well. Yet, what we believe gets refined into theological terms for us by these men who like to stand above the others and feel like they are the shapers of the church, its ideas, its purposes, and its rituals. As a result, what the people of the church know as Christianity is a highly ritualistic and mechanical system of behaviors which can almost be checked off a list, as some churches seem to try doing. But life in the church comes instead through the Spirit of God into each believer as he learns and is taught. In order for the whole Bible to stand together as a non-contradictory portrayal of life and body in the Lord, the leaders must be the guards only at the out-of-bounds marks drawn by the Word, and everywhere else, the examples of Biblical behavior amongst the brethren as they go about their own obligations in the sight of those being mentored. Then the things of the Word become known by the experiences of the people, rather than being presumed from reading theological dictionaries in the church libraries.
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