Here’s a saying to keep in your back pocket:
The only thing worse than organized religion is disorganized religion.
The fact is, all groups of people find ways of organizing, and the church must as well. However, there is a tendency to simply use the tools we have laying around in our culture. For instance, many churches use the “Pastor as CEO” model, while some use some sort of parliamentary procedures. Some cultural influence is unavoidable. But if the church is the body of Christ, a unique people in the history of mankind, then even our model of organization will be different.
The following is an excerpt from An Introduction and Example of Appreciative Inquiry, which I wrote for the MAGL. It introduces three inspirations for the unique approach to Christian organization.
1. Jesus Teachings
In Jesus and Community, Catholic theologian Gerhard Lohfink describes the community that Jesus was seeking to build. Focusing on Mark 10, Lohfink points out the conspicuous absence of “fathers” in the teachings of Jesus. He points out Jesus response to Peter when he exclaims that they have left everything to follow him. Jesus replies that “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields…”
This statement causes Lohfink to ask “why no fathers?”
Power and rule belong only to the God who the disciples may address as abba….the disciples will find everything again in the new family of God, brothers and sisters, mothers and children; but they will find fathers no longer. Patriarchal domination is no longer permissible in the new family, but only motherliness, fraternity and childlikeness before God.
2. Paul’s Model
As the early church played this out, they developed methods which share the responsibilities of organizing the church. In the original Jerusalem church, the Twelve focused on teaching the new church, but found themselves caught up in administration as well. As their needs became more complex, seven new leaders were chosen to help take care of the physical needs of the church. As the apostle Paul planted churches throughout the Roman Empire, he leaves them in the hands of elders, a group of men responsible for pastoring the church, and deacons, responsible for addressing the church’s physical needs. In an empire ruled by a dictatorial military hierarchy, the church was uniquely egalitarian.
Two passages demonstrate how Paul articulates his reasoning for the unique values of the church. In Ephesians four, Paul introduces the idea of the “five equippers” explaining that “Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service…” The church is not to be led by singular decision makers, but by those who can equip the entire church to live out Jesus’s commands.
The ideal of a multiplicity of leaders is representative of a broader understanding of the church put forth in 1 Corinthians twelve. In one of his most descriptive and entertaining passages, Paul describes the church as a body which “has many parts, but all its many parts form one body.” Although Paul is addressing racial divides in the church, his meaning is deeper: all members have value and are mutually dependent upon one another.
Realizing this vision has always proven difficult for the church. Stories about James in Acts show how the Jerusalem Church was quickly moving toward centralization. By the time of the great councils, individual bishops were responsible for all of the churches within an entire region. While the Protestant Reformation may have attacked the Catholic hierarchy, the movements of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin were quickly nationalized by emerging nationstates, who further institutionalize this top-down church government.
Aside from a few radical movements, such as some extreme anabaptist groups, this has remained true despite the multiplication of protestant denominations. For churches who wish to live out the pattern put forth in the New Testament, it will require a revolutionary and costly break with this tradition of leadership. It will also require developing new means of governance, inspired by the model of the early church, led by the Holy Spirit, and coherant in the church’s cultural context.
3. The Church’s Vision of the Future
The church’s self-understanding is rooted in its optimistic vision of the future. For Christ followers, there is nothing to fear. The great enemies have already been defeated, and all will be renewed in the future. In describing the victory of Christ, Paul states “The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For [Christ] “has put everything under his feet.”
With the confidence of one who believes there is nothing to fear, he goes on to say with confidence that “I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Paul goes on to describe how his confidence even allowed him to fight “wild animals” in Ephesus. Elsewhere, both Paul and John describe a powerful new “spiritual body” that is much more like Christ than our current ones. But the vision of the church goes beyond the personal promise of defeating death to include what Jesus refers to as “the renewal of all things.”
In Romans eight, Paul describes how creation as we know it is “subject to frustration” but will eventually be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” John exclaims at the end of his Apocalypse “Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.”
In light of this grand re-creation, N.T. Wright says that
the work of the church “is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.”
Tim Keller approaches this reality from a more pastoral angle stating that “if Jesus is God, you have to start being more optimistic about your future.”
For the church, the future is a beautiful recompense for all the shortcomings of the present. As Christ followers and organizations seek to define their unique place in God’s positive story, it must be rooted in this optimistic expectation of the future. All things including teaching, pastoral counseling, and strategic planning must be rooted in a positive outlook, a conviction that God is good, and the future can only be better than the present.
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