YOUR CHURCH IS TOO SMALL: PART 2

The Church of Works I know that there are a number of fundamentalist churches who teach or strongly imply the idea that you must constantly earn your salvation since it can be lost otherwise. This leads to a highly insecure believer who is constantly guilt-ridden. But paradoxically, there is a variation of this syndrome in the most liberal churches as well. I may have mentioned in a much earlier post that I was once part of an ecumenical study group which was charged with coming up with doctrinal statements which would be satisfactory to those of any Christian denomination.

I found myself part of a small committee in which there was a sincere young man from a much more liberal denomination than my own. At one point, out of the clear blue, he confessed to the rest of us that he had been doing his best to follow the teaching of his church to be involved in helping others in need. That included serving at a food bank, driving the elderly to appointments, etc. But he told us that he had no idea why he was doing these things or what in the world it had to do with Christianity or the church or the Bible. There was a total disconnect in his mind because the Bible was very rarely taught from the pulpit.

Divided Church Leadership I have already mentioned some of the ways in which this problem evidences itself in church life. But I will give just one more example. When my wife and I first moved to a new city, we visited the worship service of the largest congregation in town. At the end of the service but before we were dismissed, the pastor mentioned that there would be a vote that evening regarding a proposal that the deacons had come up with. The pastor then said something like “I don't know why they feel the need to come up with this idea because I for one am certainly against it, but suit yourselves.” That statement didn't exactly give me warm vibes as to the harmony present within that congregation.

The Overreacting Church For about a year before we moved out of one town we had been living in for quite a while, we were members of a congregation which is generally considered very fundamentalist. Thus I did not have very high expectations when we first visited, but was pleasantly surprised with the servant hearts that I saw everywhere in the actions of the teenagers, the pastoral staff, and the elders. Their customs were a little new to us, but there were no red flags at all, and I could go on and on with the loving and self-sacrificing attitude of everyone I met. The only real thing I could fault them with involved their attitude toward the Old Testament.

I had a frank talk with the Pastor of Adult Education after observing that of the four or five adult Sunday school offerings I could see at the time, not one involved the OT. The pastor somewhat sheepishly admitted that their denomination was widely characterized as exceedingly works-oriented and rule-keeping. So in reaction to that trend, the purposeful decision was made by the leadership to ignore the Old Testament entirely rather than perpetrate that stereotype in their own congregation. I had to applaud their motive but privately felt that they had thrown out the baby with the bath water in their quest to combat a works-oriented mindset.

The Liturgical Church Many church denominations follow a rather rigid church calendar in which the passage for the week is dictated from on high. And this is also true of those churches who go strictly by the Sunday school material supplied by their denominational leaders for each week. I know there is a rationale behind such rigidity, but it all too often leads to sermons and teachings which are not at all geared to address the current problems and concerns which an individual congregation may have and to which only a head pastor might be privy. Of course there is the opposite problem which occurs when a pastor or Sunday school teacher is totally free to preach or teach on any subject or Bible passage he wishes. Under such a situation, it is all to common for one to regularly attend the same church for decades and never even know that there are large chunks of Scripture which have never even been mentioned for fear it might confuse the congregation or contradict the official doctrine of that church. Thus it is very important that churches go out of their way to teach the whole counsel of God, not just their favorite passages.

The Church within a Church I have run into or heard of variations of this phenomenon more than once in my life. It comes about generally when a Sunday school class or small Bible study group within a congregation begins to take on a personality all its own and starts to consider themselves the only true believers there. The first time I encountered it was in New York state when I accompanied a Catholic friend of mine to a meeting of a rather large mid-week gathering of charismatic Christians who held a worship service in the facilities of a Catholic church. It was very loosely overseen by a small leadership group who was only there to keep some modicum of order if one speaker tried to monopolize the microphone. There was some very beautiful spontaneous singing in tongues by the whole congregation and a few well chosen words of wisdom. I really wished them well, but eventually the local Roman Catholic leadership closed the meeting down because the “revelations” spoken there had become totally beyond their control.

A similar thing happened in one Southern Baptist congregation before I began attending when apparently a run-away Sunday school group meeting downstairs during worship hour started adopting a Jewish model of worship instead. And at an earlier church of which I was a member, there was even a group of two young men of semi-Pentacostal persuasion who considered themselves the only true Christians in the whole congregation.

The Flip-Side I am afraid these two posts may only confirm the feelings of some Christians that the worse thing about the church today is the people. And I will agree that it is all too easy to give up on worshiping with others for fear that the inevitable conflicts will arise. So let me quickly try to reverse that opinion by reminding you that the same could easily be said regarding in one's workplace or one's biological or adopted family. You don't immediately distance yourself from those people just because you don't agree in lockstep on every issue. The closer you get to anyone else, even if you feel that you are sympathetic souls, the more you will begin to see the sometimes quite drastic ways the two of you view life. And that occurrence only multiplies exponentially with the more people you begin to know on a close basis.

The sooner you begin to recognize that universal fact, the sooner you can become reconciled to it and try to take advantage of all the differences human beings have and learn from them. If you do that you will start of see how many believers, despite or because of their different make-ups, can band together under a common umbrella of beliefs and goals. One way of starting that journey might be to study how the prominent New Testament apostles as well as Paul and his companions approached their common faith from entirely different backgrounds, butted heads on occasion regarding specific issues, but still managed to continue working together to accomplish the common goal of spreading the Gospel throughout the world.