(Continuing the description of this virtual parish…)
I am not the parish; it would function just fine without me.
A two-edged sword in use here is that our parish is both voluntary and decentralized. I assert no authority at all, except for some limited control over the content. Indeed, I have zero control over the advertising on the blog. I also have zero control over the membership of the parish. It formed spontaneously around my blog; I simply gave the community a name. You can call it anything you like.
That’s because it’s all voluntary. The degree to which I have any influence, it’s more a matter of whether God convicts folks to accept my teaching. If the members choose to connect outside of my awareness, who am I to complain? That’s precisely what I hope they’ll do. There is no central control here at all.
The only power worth having is moral power, the power of God’s character filling and shaping this world moment by moment. Any other form of human leverage is inherently evil when it does not first stand on the moral authority of divine justice. That authority proceeds from the heart because only the heart can perceive it’s path in the world. The mind can just barely be trained to cooperate with the leadership of the heart. If there is going to be leadership by the Spirit of God, it must come through the heart morally committed to His glory.
Thus, any power that apes human political mechanisms in any way is abuse by definition. That most churches insist on being organized politically is all we need to know to understand their moral failures. This parish does work through the exercise of influence on the level of the flesh; the mind is part of the flesh. The influence and authority here is cultivated entirely through the agape of the Spirit, not any form of human political leverage. I am marrying souls to the Spirit of God, not to enslaving minds to my fleshly presence.
So there is no orthodoxy here, only grounds for cooperation, and a sliding scale at that. Cultivating my affection is a simple matter of interacting peacefully. People who seek with me a path of cooperation will find it. That is the path of moral purity. My purity is not your purity, nor vice versa. My path is not yours, but you can absorb a moral understanding for your own heart by observing my path. Your heart will guide you in responding to the relevant elements in my story. If your heart is alive and active on the moral plane of understanding, you will recognize for yourself what you need from the narrative offered in this online parish.
The idea is to set you free in Christ, not to assert external controls.
