Monthly Archives: September 2009
Leaving and Cleaving
I left the institutional church (IC) in the fall of 2007, with my wife and family. I left because I was convinced that the human organization was not achieving God’s greatest purposes, and in fact could not achieve them, in spite of the fact that God faithfully indwells the people who gather together on Sunday mornings. Well, yes…we also left because the Lord led us out.
I believe that the IC lives a contradiction, saying one thing in its teaching, but another with its structure. “The medium is the message.” As a result, believers are equipped for ministry but never released. Leaders end up controlling the laity rather than empowering them. (For more see Identity and Authority of the Believer).
When I left the IC I was not alone. In the previous six months a number of other families had been making the same journey. But “where” were they going?
In the fall of 2007 I attended a local service where the preacher was sharing some of the early days in the life of a particular church community. He quoted David Ruis’ first sermon, delivered there shortly after the church had been founded. The title was, “Going, but not knowing,” based on the life of Abraham.
If you haven’t peeked into the book of Hebrews recently, I encourage you to do so. It’s difficult to grasp what a life of faith is like while living in our security focused culture. But I am also reminded of some words of Elizabeth O’Connor, one of the founders of the Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. She wrote that “Our security focused culture must be willing to allow that to be brought into being which might fail.”
But the entire structure of Sunday services is to ensure that there are no “failures,” no “glitches,” and that everything flows along smoothly. We take no risks when we meet in such settings. We know where we are going and where we will all arrive. We hope that we will all be together when we get there.
Risk…faith…moving ahead into the unknown.. Which of us really embraces such a journey? We prefer the well worn pathways. And besides, we are “found” and not lost, right? Surely we now have all the answers, right?
They have cradled you in custom,
They have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase
You’re a credit to their teaching–
You are building the kingdom without straw!
www.kennypittman.org
Sizing up the Enemy VIII
Satan has the freedom to cheat. The fact that Satan is not constrained by ethics can be a significant advantage. Total pragmatism—winning at any cost and by any means—is had to combat. We, on the other hand, have to wage war according to God’s rules. In human combat, always telling the truth would be unthinkable, deceiving your enemy is a crucial wartime operation. Satan does this all the time, but we don’t have the freedom to lie. While we wouldn’t have much chance of deceiving him anyway, we could deceive his human servants if we were permitted. He uses manipulation and intimidation to good effect, but these are out of bounds for us as well.
We are not to play into the culture’s popular desires but instead generally confront people with a message they find offensive. Satan is free to tell them exactly what they want to hear. He promises them the very thing they desire even though he has no intention of delivering.
God won’t overrule human free will in most cases; he waits for a choice from feeble humans at multiple. But Satan won’t hesitate to enslave people and overtake them to various extents, even without their knowledge. In a word, God often forbids us to do the pragmatically useful thing and instead calls us to forfeit results for the sake of faithfulness to him.
True Accountability
With the advent of so many support groups in America today, “accountability” has become one of the big “buzz words” of our culture. Those of us who have struggled with life-dominating habits have learned to meet together so that we can be answerable to each other about how we are doing with that problem. But the principle of accountability in the Bible means much more than just telling another person how we have done with our particular problem that week. It means that we should hold our entire lives accountable to those believers we have joined ourselves with. It is one of the tremendous tools the Lord has given us in our own personal war with sin.
This tool that God gave us, when I tried to use it, that was the beginning of my fall in the institutionalized church. I learned quickly that you should never correct one of the top ten tithers.
Unfortunately, IC short for institutionalized church has turned accountability into the “ability to count”.
Because of our mobile society and the make-up of our large churches, believers find it very easy to attend church without any true accountability. This is one of the great tragedies of the Church today: millions of Christians “doing their own thing,” without being answerable to the leadership God has placed over them and even to each other. This is one of the main reasons sin is so rampant today in our churches.
www.kennypittman.org
A New Perspective
Today, 1700 years [later], we have become so accustomed with the congregational-type church, that many find it hard to even imagine any other form of ”real church life” or ”worship services”. Those historical events created a powerful system, a uniformed pattern, a sanctioned and later even sanctified structure, which has molded the experiences and the mindset of people over long centuries, and has created a distorted picture of church that is not any more true to its original.
This whole process canonized and institutionalized a devastating mediocrity, a middle-of-the road-solution, simply functioning in religious and political correctness of the day. The congregational church became a ”structural lie,” because it paints the right message in the wrong colors, casts the right material in wrong forms, fills the water of life into contaminated bottles, takes the redeemed sinners and forms them into a harmless species of nice churchgoers and program participants. It makes heavenly promises, but does not deliver them on earth. It forgot to focus on the extended family as the building block of Christianity, and settled into occupying religious temples, more or less heavily ornate, reciting worship patterns in a small but solid haven of heaven on earth. Wolfgang Simson, Houses That Change the World
Let’s say you are driving down the road in your car. You’ve been driving on this road with some friends, who are in their own cars. You’ve been on this same road for twenty years.
Suddenly someone suggests that you stop the car and take a look around. Hmm. Novel idea! You do so, and together you pull to the side of the road. For the first time in twenty years you step out of your car. Next you walk a bit of distance away from your vehicles, and together you stand and look at them.
You have never done this before.
You would be struck by a whole number of impressions, including the size and shape and color of the vehicles. You might be struck by how dirty they are.
You might be amazed that what you thought was an average vehicle is old and rusty, with the paint chipping off. You might wonder how the bald tires have ever managed to hold the road.
You might be appalled at the dirty smoke issuing out of the exhaust pipe, producing black choking clouds behind the vehicle.
You might also be struck by the friends now standing nearby. Hmm.. they look just like me! They wear the same clothes, talk the same, and drive the same kind of car.
But the main thing is, this is the first time you have seen the vehicle from the outside. You are going to find yourself on a learning curve. You might wonder why it has four tires, and why they are so small. You might think it would be a good idea to have a tinted windshield next time. You might wonder why you aren’t in a bus, so that you can share the space with friends.
Stepping outside the IC gives a perspective that one cannot have while inside it. A whole host of assumptions are seen for the first time. These presuppositions about the nature of church, ministry, and community are widely held and rarely examined. Some of them prove to be accurate and unchanging; but most of them are temporal, cultural, and bear examination. Some of them don’t really fit well with a New Testament understanding of the church. Square wheels are not a good idea!
THAT is a mouthful. If it doesn’t bring a sense of recognition to your heart, thank God. If it does, it should bring tears to your eyes and a sense of shame. This, my friends, is the state of Jesus body. What are we going to do about it? Will you rise up with the spirit of Jesus as a true warrior and determine not to play church games anymore? Will you stand up and make a difference?
