If you read the Gospels, the Religious Right is most often wrong
Fredericksburg.com - If you read the Gospels, the Religious Right is most often wrong
I found this article pretty sharp edged. Amazing how the secular press views and digs to interpret even the religious culture that surrounds it. So given, the idea Rick throws out what is it that we can do to show we are the body?
Sell all we have? Live on Less so we can give more? How do we hold ourselves and institutions accountable with the finances and wealth God has so blessed with here in America?
Sojourning,
Robb
I found this article pretty sharp edged. Amazing how the secular press views and digs to interpret even the religious culture that surrounds it. So given, the idea Rick throws out what is it that we can do to show we are the body?
Sell all we have? Live on Less so we can give more? How do we hold ourselves and institutions accountable with the finances and wealth God has so blessed with here in America?
Sojourning,
Robb
6 Comments:
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Ok so what is our responsibilty? If we are called to be wise and live to honor and glorify the Lord where do we draw the line with institutions, especially the one that tries to trap our resources into its walls?
If God burns a vision into your heart of a way to impact the community for his Glory and you seek the help of that institution because, #1 honestly there is no way one man's resource can accomplish the task #2 that institution claims to have the same desires and finally #3 your in community with the people of that institution...
But that institution is constrained like a whore to the red light district with its budget and programs that they will not budge to the move of the Lord.
What is my responsibility in the area of resources when the whore is draining the life out of me? And don't give me no "if god wants to do it he will provide the resources" because I will just claim he has already provided the resources and they are just hoarded by the whore so she can get her fix on a weekly basis.
Ok. I'm with you when it comes to staying put until God says move but I still struggle with the whole giving area of the corporate expression.
Do you feel free to give on a regular basis to the institution because God has you here right now? Or is there some other thought behind your giving to the institution? Sorry is If I have suggested you give to the institution, if you don't.
I feel free to give to people in the fellowhship but I don't like whores like I used too! :) All of this stems from not trusting leadership and my anti-establishment background. If I cannot freely give to the structure God has me in is he telling me that is ok or to leave?
The only thing I know right now about the institution is God has told me to cultivate faithfulness. But my prayer is often is this where you want me to do this?
It appears, on first reading, that 'institution' and 'whore' are derogatory terms used descriptively of the church, am I right?
Is she really a whore?
As for institution: why is the fact that the church is an institution a problem? For surely it must be admitted that marriage and family are also institutions. Instituted by God no less. I think this term is used to often in an abstract sort of way to sum up what some would think of as 'worldly' or 'merely human' structures with the church. But in order to make that judgement one needs a thorough understanding of the development of the early church as well as the wisdom to determine what is 'worldly' from what is incarnational. In other words whatever is divine in the nature of the church must be manifested in earth through the flesh. Don't let flesh (body) here be confused with 'fleshly'; Jesus came and lived in the flesh ('embodied'). That is the way it must be comprehended. The Church is not pure spirit. She is the Body of Christ (and therefore the 'embodiment' of Christ) in the earth as well as the Bride of Christ in the heavens.
In no way do I mean the church is a whore. The institution is the organization that man has created in his attempts to control and predict. That is the whore I talk of. Budgets and hierarchichal structures that try and detract from the direct authority Christ has in the believers life is nothing but the allure of a whore.
The church to me is something so much bigger than the institution that represents itself on sunday and what the world calls the church. Its a living, breathing organism which include us.
OK that helps.
Now why do you say, "The institution is the organization that man has created in his attempts to control and predict."?
There isn't much doubt that Protestant church structure is the construct of man. Luther and then Calvin created something out of their own mind.
The same can't be said for the church catholic. How do you know it wasn't the Lord who 'built' his Church? Perhaps the development of church ecclesiology in the first one hundred years of the church was a necessary and ordained 'outworking' of what Jesus himself founded and started on its way. Look at it this way. A human skeleton isn't life, but it is necessary for life. It sustains life.
It seems imperative in this kind of discussion to keep seperate our understanding of the nature of the church over against the execution of that understanding. People are always going to fail, be corrupted, sin, etc., in the effort to be what the Lord has embodied us to be.
In what way, in principle, do heirarchical structures "detract from the direct authority Christ has in the believers life" rather than protect the church against all that would destroy her? And here you must not limit yourself to your own experience with Hampton Cove, but must, as Lewis taught, step outside your own age, and see the thing as a whole. The early church would have vanished under anything except what actually happened. The heirarchical structure, the great councils, saved her. My question is: by what right and whose authority does anyone claim to operate in abandoning thr form of the church that, it appears to me, the Lord instituted?
Will an appeal to the authority of Scripture suffice? The early church did not have that claim, and therefore, it does not appear that must be the 'only' means of authority for the church. Otherwise how did she function and survive until the canon was established?
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