I’ll return to the next installment of “Whose Church is it anyway?” after these two observations:
It is gratifying and hope-giving to me to have so many people chime in on this series about church division and pain….sort of. While I interpret the interest as genuine concern and care for the church, I am also aware that most of us are speaking out of personal experience. Which leads me to the obvious point that many of us have been part of less than ideal church communities that have left their marks (scars?) on us?
The second perhaps less obvious point is what we are NOT writing and thinking about while we are engaged in this discussion about overcoming church pain and division, encouraging pastors to fulfill their biblically prescribed roles and envisioning a healthy church.
Coming back from Africa I wanted to dedicate myself to blogging more on how the church can address the very real crisis of poverty in the world. While in Belize, I decided that the evangelical church needs to re-consider our roles as stewards of creation with a more consistent commitment to biblically rooted attitudes and actions regarding the environment.
But I came back to friends who are parts of churches in pain. So poverty and creation care takes a back seat. (As does mission, evangelism and any other opportunity to make a difference in the world.)
I learned these lessons twenty years ago when I led mission trips to Haiti and Mexico with high school students. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was proved over and over. Maslow says that meeting physical, social and emotional needs must always precede spiritual or “self-actualization” needs. In other words, it’s really hard to care about evangelism, social justice or “incarnational ministry” when you have dysentery. And frankly it’s hard to care about either creation or the poor when your community is crumbling around you.
I am not one of those who say that we should just take our eyes off this church stuff and get about the business of being a witness for Christ in the world. I just don't think that it is possible. (And the NT letters with all the conversation about church unity and love for each other seem to offer evidence of support here, too.)
Instead I want us to acknowledge that if we all don’t get this Christian community thing right, we’ll never deal with anything else. So back to it…
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