Playing The Game

I have said this before. I am a restorationist. I am an idealist. I hold things up to the light and measure them against what should be the standard, and as you might guess, I am greeted with disappointment.

I find I do this with the Church. There are so many options out there and guess what; none of them measure up to what I see in scripture - for the most part. There are so many places that get hung up with human rule making and many times, the rules are allowed to overrule the love and grace of Jesus Christ. It's unfortunate.

The way in which churches choose leadership and staff is interesting and mostly unbiblical. Have we studied the book of Acts? How did the first Christians choose their leadership?

They did not. God chose the original leadership of the church. That leadership appointed pastors, elders and teachers and they also set up a standard for future generations that they (we) could use to make more leaders. It was simple.

Later though, men, eager to maintain powerful positions within churches, began to build rules around the biblical standard. Those rules differ depending on your denomination. Even if you are an independent, self governing church, there are man made rules - hoops that men must jump through if they wish to become leaders or staff members in their congregations.

There are background checks, education requirements, experience requirements, moral requirements and the list goes on. Bible colleges are more like denominational headquarters designed to keep certain traditions of men in place as they train future church leaders and staff members. All of these things are man made, worldly, and I might add, thoroughly western. They are not quite like the traditions of the Pharisees, but they sometimes approach that. And there is crony-ism. One gets where they are going in a church because of who they know. What a mess that can be.

This stuff is just not in the Bible. It can crush the desire to serve. It is designed to vet; to keep out anyone that does not agree with the status quo. It is designed to control and crush obedient non-rule keepers.

What it really does is crush the movement of the Spirit in a church. Many churches lose good men to other churches because they would not take a risk or because they did not measure up to the man made standard or because they had a different point of view.

We need to wake up.

Jesus took a risk with me years ago and it's finally paying off for both of us. I love Him. He took a risk with y'all too. Remember that the next time you decide to exclude someone because they do not want to play your games.