March 12, 2014
Life Support
The majority of my congregation is made up of
the older generation. Recently a church leader remarked, “If we don’t do something this church is going to die.”
Really? Certainly some of our older folks are passing away, and I would agree
that most of those coming in the front door are not getting baptized or placing
membership. However our attendance remains consistent and from my perspective
we are far from being terminal. I find it interesting that my friend speaks in
terms of “we” need to save the church, as though “we” have the power to control
the size of the body. Similar to God breathing into Adam the breath of life,
the Spirit blew the breath of life into our congregation. I’m sure God has his
finger on the pulse of the church and if necessary He is capable of CPR.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----He’s right. Your church is going to die. One by one. Nobody lives forever.
-----I think we understand his sense of the term though. And in that sense I perceive very bad theology. The church certainly isn’t the building in which it worships or the supplies it uses. It’s the people who gather together. He knows it this way, too. But I think we can more closely connect with the reality of the church when we stop talking about it as something which can be changed, controlled, or directed.
-----There certainly is an universal church of the sense of all souls who love righteousness and have come to the Lord for it. You have to view it timelessly, because part of it hasn’t yet come, another part hasn’t yet been born, and most of it has passed on from this temporal life. But there is also the church where the Lord is with any two or more of His brethren being together. This is the particular church scholars, theologians, pastors, etc refer to as “the local church”.
-----Yet, “the local church” is merely an abstract concept. For into it and out of it are always flowing people who know the Lord as they make different mixes of believers in different places. As such, “the local church” is never the same church, for the church is not an abstract, it is a concrete reality made of the folks who are together at a particular point in time.
-----Now, maybe we can better understand what Paul meant by Christ being the head of the church and by the elders ruling well the affairs of the church, rahter than ruling the church well. We members of the church do not rule the church. We rule the affairs of it.
-----And what are the affairs of the church? What? Are people just bodies? Do they not have minds and emotions and concepts and plans and goals which sometimes clash and other times lack possibilities? The relationships of these to the truth of God’s Word and the way they sort together within that relationship without clashing and with possibilities emerging from the mix are all the church’s affairs. From these minds and emotions comes the hymns and spiritual songs they sing to one another (Eph 5:19), the aspirations for missions and supporting missionaries and food banks and orphanages and every other good deed done toward man on earth, whether done by a lone soul or many in consort. These are the affairs of the church. Moreover, are the minds and emotions and concepts and plans and goals spotlessly free of error? Of course not. They are so tainted with error that we’ve become desensitized to much of what can be improved through encouragement, inspiration, or simple influence - more affairs of the church. Some errors are more than deleterious; they are immediately destructive. Elders do a better job of handling these affairs.
-----But of the more deleterious sort are these ideas that the church somehow needs controlled, tampered with, or adjusted to the attraction of some ethereal crowd of folks straining to get in, but just not quite being able to because the affairs of old folks are being attended as well. The church does not need anyone who begrudges the needs of somebody else, including and especially the expressive needs of our parents - the old folks, whom the Bible tells us to honor. So elders would serve the affairs of the church well to ignore such ideas about controlling people's expressive asperations (remembering our recent and brief study of “proistemi”, the Greek term for “rule”.) When elders finally start “ruling” these affairs well we will have trouble making room for all who will join the wonder.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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