February 20, 2008
Plug 'em in
Under today’s church organizational plan when someone accepts the Lord we immediately try to get him connected or plugged in. The new believer fills out a personal profile so we can match his strengths with the church’s needs. We encourage him to attend indoctrination classes, serve in ministries and join a small group. Certainly no one wants a baby Christian to get lost in the crowd and it’s important for everyone to be a functioning part of the body. However, I sometimes wonder if we’re telling the Spirit, ‘You called him and he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Thanks, but we can take it from here.’
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Gail;
-----I think you are very right. I’ve said it many times on your blog site, in many different ways, I believe that the first love forsaken by the Church at Ephesus (Rev 2:4) was that sense for personal relationship with the Lord as understood together by the community of believers. Sure, each one of us understands our own individual, personal relationship, and we relate to the Lord in that manner. But it seems to end there. We then try to understand others according to our own relationship with the Lord. We experience a mountain-top insight, so we think how great it would be if everyone had it. Someone else does something noticeably significant, then we all want to do the same. Kind of like voting for Obama. This inward need to be like each other is human nature. And although the Lord makes use of it in raising His Holy Temple, we get carried away with it. At some point, we begin expecting others to find the same understandings we have found.
-----In the weekly, morning Bible study I enjoy with a few other brothers, there are two whom I refer to as “Judaizers.” They believe that the Lord expects them to observe all the holy days, feasts, and special days the Old Testament instructed for Israel. That is all well and good. I admire them for their driving dedication to the Lord, and for their expression of it through as much detail as they can extract from the Word. That is their relationship with Lord. But they are always prepared to persuade the rest of us that our faith is less than it should be unless we too observe those events. And they go away with less satisfaction if they feel they’ve not swayed us somewhat towards their own ways. But it is not in our own ways that Scripture calls us to encourage one another. Apart from obviously unscriptural behavior and ideas, true love encourages another in his understood ways. Love does not insist on one’s own ways.
-----Yet church leaders determine their ways are the Lord’s ways, simply because God put them in positions of leadership. How phony. How many divisions do we now have in the church? There are Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Catholics, Baptists, Southern Baptists too, mind you, and Pentecostals, Lutherans, Nazarenes, Seventh Day Adventists, Campbellites (the ones I loved), Eastern Orthodox, there are even some Coptics left, and then there are innumerable divisions of each of the above. And each division must take care to process its little caught fishies according to the specific instructions of the leaders, or gasp, gasp, the division might begin to fade! So it is that the current trend of the church is to McDonaldize the salvation and discipleship processes.
-----But this way or that way, or your way or my way, or whatever way is not the way the Lord looks for all of His people to be His. All He really wants us to commonly know is to call on Christ and to learn obedience as He has spoken through His apostles and prophets. As that learning process proceeds, the certainty is that every last one of us are going to enjoy some perceptions quite different than those of others. Yet the Lord does give the church teachers. We do not all form our own perceptions entirely without each other. As Paul acknowledges to the Corinthians, “We know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” (I Cor 8:1). So why then do we continue to use our teachers to teach our personal methods of evangelism, our peculiar techniques of baptism, our tendencies of communion, our ways of service, our doctrinal details, etc., etc., etc., when there is honor, respect, consideration, habits of agreement and acknowledgment, attitudes of mutual peace and adoration to be taught? Which teaching might more closely lead to unity in love and unity in the Spirit? Yah, I think so too. So why then even more McDonaldization? Get out of the Spirit’s way and let Him have His hearts.
Love to you all,
Steve Corey
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