January 10, 2013
Tools of the Trade
The man in charge of
organizing other men in our church to serve communion called to say he would be
out of town on Sunday and he then proceeded to pass along a detailed list of
the duties for the servers. Realizing he was overdoing the instructions he
chuckled, “What can I say…I’m an
engineer.” We often forget that when people become part of the body of
Christ they don’t simply leave their career and personality at the church
threshold. Even though the disciples left their nets on the shore of Galilee to
follow Jesus, they didn’t leave behind their nature of being fishermen. Jesus
said, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Matt
4:19 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Christ didn’t give the control of his church to man. Many think He did, and worse yet, they act like He did. They heaped definitions and prescriptions and visions upon it until the church divided up into little self-perceptive groups whose differences became walls of separation when they should have been points of appreciation. And this began barely before the first century was finished. Now it is completely expected by nearly everyone and thoroughly approved by most.
-----The very thing that should have been one of the church’s more remarkable evidences of the Spirit’s participation in and amongst us became material for strife and shameful divisions. We bring to the Lord who we are. Nobody has any personality or skills or understanding or knowledge other than that small bit they actually do have. It is almost trite to say it. But it is important to note. Because if that is good enough for the Lord to accept, and we surely have heard plenty about “Come as you are,” then it must be good enough for us to accept, lest we be setting ourselves a cut above Him. This is simply Romans 15 stuff, “Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” (Rom 15:7)
-----Then everyone having come is acceptable to Christ and useful to Him in some way only He, themselves, and their close acquaintances know and appreciate. So as man controls and directs the activities of the church, the small bit of skills and knowledge and understanding of the few doing the controlling are expressed in the decisions made. Everybody else’s are either ignored, or worse, are suppressed. How can it be otherwise? Decisions are made by the finite contents of finite minds. So let the finite control in only the finite situations.
-----We think we alleviate the problem by electing people to run the church. But this is only more of the same by a different route. Still, the few run the church. We have this innate mindset that someone must be directing everyone to act as a collective. This destroys the beauty God made of participation and fellowship. Every skill is useful in its place. Every insight and understanding built from the Words of God crossing the experiences of a person benefits any particular situation it fits. The activities of the church are the expressions of its life. And the life of the church are all its members plying their skills and expressing their insights by the guidelines of a new character described by God’s Word. None do it perfectly. Few do it well. But all who are in the Lord do it towards improvement. And the church then is the glorious mix of everyone’s doing what each sees needing done for his neighbors. It is Christ reigning in the heart of each member of the body who is the head of the church. The direction of the church’s activities, the definitions of its characteristics, the prescriptions for its functioning, the foresight in its visions all should emerge from its members living their individual purposes and skills and wisdom as the circumstances of their intermingling evokes.
-----We bring our careers and personalities into the church, because these are inseparable parts of us. And they are useful. As for the leaders whom we are directed to obey, their oversight is given to the growth and development of the love and patience and forgiveness and forbearance and kindness and benevolence and humility and sincerity and all the other character traits of the new life, because each of these is a portal in the member through which the direction of Christ flows into the mix. The more we obey them in these matters of the church, more the Lord leads in using our individual careers and personalities.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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