We continue where I left off with the previous post: The core of our fellowship is people deeply committed to Christ, with the kind of faith that keeps them clinging to Him through disasters.
This is the first and most important key to our identity as a community. Anyone who grasps that as the vision for life here in this world can be our family. Whether or not they want to spend much time with us is the next question. The issue is not uniformity, but tolerance for the inevitable differences. The question each covenant body must address is what will hinder the family from its fundamental mission of building that kind of faith in each other.
There are differences in belief that will affect how we proceed. We must discern and act on disruptions. This is not something that can be set in stone, simply because the various members will themselves determine what they can tolerate. The biblical model is clear on the Two Witnesses: there must be an elder, a head of household your rules a feudal domain, and a priestly figure (we’ll use the term “pastor”) who leads in rituals and discerns defilement issues.
These roles do not break down into our common democratic models; the Bible is all about feudal tribalism. The covenant community is a small copy of how God does things with fallen humans, and the model for that was clearly painted in the Bible. Thus, the elder and pastor will set the tone. And in the next community down the road, the elder and pastor there would set the tone differently, according to the talents and calling God invested in them. It’s people, not rules.
Now, Kiln of the Soul does have an elder (yours truly), and for the time being, I also play the pastoral role only because we are waiting for someone to relieve me of that burden. We have something in the works, I believe, so stay tuned on that question. Part of the difficulty here is that Kiln of the Soul will be both a virtual parish with one or more meat-space bodies in a covenant community of faith. Juggling the differences between how virtual and real communities operate is a major consideration all the time. We’ve had the virtual community for a long time, but the real world version is just now aborning.
Activating now an offline community will be a study in errors on the way to glory. The administrative issues will be reported here as they arise, but we need a vision first, or we have no hope. That vision includes discerning what our identity must be. That’s a question of what we are and are not, in terms of what we can say about it in words. Because we are dealing with real humans, I believe the best way to see it is layers of inclusion. It’s not a question of membership rosters, etc. It’s more of an organic question of how we will operate as a family.
And that first layer is we will be a people of deep faith. We have all been tested in one way or another. We have all failed in various ways. The issue is not success, but desire. God is very clear about that in the Bible: Those who dearly love Him are His people. Mistakes are expected, but the core issue is commitment.
We aren’t looking for operational and administrative expertise. We are looking for the fire of faith. Those who manifest the burn scars and stink of that fire have passed the first test, particularly for leadership. Because the one thing that holds a family together strong is that commitment to the sacrificial love of Christ.
