When
I was a pastor, I regularly received flyers from various
"consultants" who offered me a scheme to "fix" my church. I
threw them all away.
These
patent nostrums purveyed various forms of organization that would transmogrify
my congregation from a candidate for "The Biggest Loser" to a
suitable starlet for next season's episode of "The Bachelorette." I
can still recall some of the biggies: elder rule, house churches, the pointiest
of pentagram Calvinisms, along with various forms of "blessings"
which I could imbibe at various locations. Each one promised an end of
carnality and bickering, full offering baskets, jam-packed pews and a
worry-free parsonage.
As
I say, I dust-binned the lot of 'em. Not that my church never needed
"fixing." It usually did; after all, it had me for its pastor! No, I
threw them away because I know quackery when I see it. The give-away was that
these mountebanks all promised to take my church back to the pristine condition
of "the New Testament Church."
Well,
I didn't feel obligated to read their advertisements if they hadn't read the
New Testament.
Paul
has barely launched into his letter to the church at Corinth - an outfit he
formed his own apostolic self as founding pastor - before he tears into them
for their divisions. They had asked a bunch of important and intricate
theological questions but Paul defers all of that to take up the more important
issue of the four-way free-for-all going on in the fellowship. This leads me to
a few conclusions.
First,
nobody's flow-chart is going to produce a conflict-free church. I once heard
Dallas Willard say, "The problem isn't the church; it's the people."
Now Willard was too good a Baptist to be serious about that distinction but I
got what he meant: any organizational method run by sinners will go awry soon
and often. I stopped arguing much about church polity when I realized that
fellow-pastors from Rome to Wittenberg to Geneva to Canterbury and straight on
to Nashville faced pretty much the same issues.
Second,
nobody gets a pass on the local church. I remember a man who left our
congregation once and declared that he and his wife were going to be a church
unto themselves. He admitted some vague preference in the New Testament for
assembling together but explained that the church today is such a pig's
breakfast that, well, those passages are past their sell-by date. I responded
that nobody in our church (at least as far as I knew!) was sleeping with his
step-mother (1 Cor 5) so the Scripture was probably still in effect.
Finally,
the only cure is crucifixion. Paul wraps up this section by pointing to the
cross. That jars us less than it should because we read it as modern Americans,
not ancient Romans. "The very word 'cross,'" Cicero once wrote,
"should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but
form his thoughts, his eyes and his ears." Paul, by contrast, says we
should hear, see, and bear nothing else. And many times, the cross that cures the church is the church herself! Stay in the church to stay on the cross; stay on the cross to become the Church.
The
real problem with the miracle cure medicines those pill-peddlers pushed on me
as a pastor was not that they wouldn't work (indeed, had all been tried more
than once in church history and hadn't worked), but that their real
selling-point was a chance to let my cup pass from me.
As
I say, I threw them all away.
Step Right Up!
Doug
thanks
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