Ecclesiology 21 - A Quick Thought on the Church

     I realized the other day that I left out a point in my discussion of the New Church, one that I guessed was rather self-evident but probably isn't.

    In today's church - Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox - there are an awful lot of "bench warmers;" people who think of church as a spiritual gas station.  You know who you are.  You stop by once a week to fill up your tank, give the attendant a few bucks, then go back to your "real life" and hope the fuel lasts for seven days, thus having fulfilled your spiritual responsibilities.  You are a Christian, but in name only.  Might I first suggest meditating on the Epistle of James.

    My second suggestion is a good deal more radical, but the reader should be accustomed to that by now.  It is my opinion (and mine alone) that within a few weeks of joining, the new church member should receive a friendly visit from a couple of deacons and elders.  During this visit, the group should discuss the various missions of the church, the various occupations used to fulfill those missions, and the new member should be invited to prayerfully consider which job the Holy Spirit has in mind for him or her.  It should be made clear that the Holy Spirit has provided the new member with certain gifts for the purpose of service, and that among those gifts is not "attendee."  Among the deacons' assignments, then, will be following up on this meeting and checking on their charges' progress occasionally.

    This, of course, must be handled with the greatest delicacy, as should be all interactions within the body.  The purpose is to encourage, not to shame or coerce.  Still, I think it is important to note how important it is that every cell in the body is to discover its function and perform it to the best of its ability, that the church doesn't need one brain, one stomach and 40 million appendices.  Like my granddaddy always used to say, "the strongest opinions at any football game are expressed by the folks sitting in the stands."


Pax


P.S. In the weeks intervening since originally posting this, I've carefully considered my own function within the Body of Christ.  I've long thought of myself as a brain, a heart, or at least a hand.  Having meditated on the topic a good deal, I've almost concluded that I am, in fact, a kidney.  My primary function seems to be to clean up the messes made by others.  I first thought of this as a menial and undignified job, but the Holy Spirit asked me if I knew anyone trying to live without kidneys, which I do.  Sometimes I hate it when the Holy Spirit points out the obvious.  ☺

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All Good Things...

When I posted my summary of Hollow Faith , my counter indicated that it was the 99th post I've made on this blog.  A nice, round 100 seems like a good place to stop, so I decided to come up with one more bag of hot air for posterity.  As I type the first draft of this paragraph, I have no idea what I may have left unsaid, so perhaps I should focus on a conspectus of what has gone before. To my non-believing readers: 1. First off, congratulations!  Your skepticism at least implies a certain level of intelligence.  Good for you!  Please go further.  Look inside yourself.  Ferret out any assumptions or biases that may be subconsciously clouding your judgment.  A materialistic or humanistic bias does not represent an improvement over a deistic one.  Don't let it cause you to dismiss the fortuity of a Greater Power out of hand.  Stay open to possibilities.  Even Carl Sagan, quoting Martin Rees and others, famously said that "absence of e...
Read more

Hollow Faith 5 - Meism

I felt a lot of sympathy for Justice and Taylor Swift when their MTV Awards wins were interrupted by Kanye West's impromptu rants designed to upstage their acceptance speeches in 2006 and 2009, respectively.  How rude.  How utterly narcissistic.  My sympathy was somewhat tempered when, in 2014, Swift's "Blank Space" landed on the Rolling Stone's list of "Most Narcissistic Songs of All Time."  Dr. Nathan DeWall, in his paper Tuning in to Psychological Change  (2011), says that narcissism is on the rise in popular music.  However, unlike the PMRC, who attribute the noticeable trends in youth to the influence of popular music, DeWall thinks it's the other way round; that popular music doesn't cause cultural trends in youth but reflects them. Would someone please tell me who the heck Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian actually are?  These three women are apparently wildly famous for being wildly famous.  None of them sing, dance, act, ow...
Read more

Christian Life 35 - Solving for X

I expect responses to this one.  Don't disappoint me. Imagine this: a mathematician approaches a blackboard covered with an impossibly complex equation; hundreds of numbers, dozens of functions and an array of variables.  The mathematician is to solve for x .  Now imagine that the mathematician determines that the solution to the equation must be x=0 before even picking up the chalk.  If x happens to not equal zero, then they have just doomed themselves to not only spending the rest of their life attempting to manipulate the equation in a vain effort to make x=0 , but also seeing to it that it is a very frustrating life in the effort.  After some time, the most casual observer could see that the project was doomed and would consider the mathematician a fool for persisting in his efforts. I believe this is how so many of us approach life.  When we reach the age at which we feel the need to develop a personal philosophy and examine the various aspects of li...
Read more