The Covenant People of God are in the world, but not of it.
We can declare the Conservative Dads’ pin-up calendar evil. It’s all we can do to avoid staring at it ourselves, but we should never twitch a finger toward keeping it out of the hands of others. I won’t tell you to avoid places where such a calendar is displayed; you will need to construct your own self-discipline about such things. Any help I can give you must be more individual, face to face, than attempting to formulate rules for everyone.
And even in so saying, I’m presenting an individual eldership choice that may not work for other elders and their communities. I cannot know what they face and what their membership is like. But I will go so far as to suggest that leaving it in their hands is something that should be a part of any Christian culture we propose, even as we offer to help them think through things that are difficult.
The question is not what you discern, but that you discern. I want to promote the duty to pull in that responsibility down to the lowest level of spiritual leadership. If you are in a position to provide moral covering for others, then it’s a duty you cannot pass to a higher elder authority.
I’m convinced that we have done this job wrong for most of the past 2000 years. It might have been done well when Paul was still traveling across the Mediterranean Basin, but it didn’t take long after his fellow apostle John died for things to go sour. Very quickly the church elders of the Second Century AD began drifting into a culture that was foreign to divine revelation. It’s gotten only more remote since then.
The fundamental mission of the community of faith is (1) manifest the Covenant Word by living it so as to harvest the blessings and (2) using that testimony to call out to the unconscious Elect and bring them into the Covenant community. There is absolutely nothing we can do for the non-elect. The focus is glorifying God the way He wants it to happen, and those two points are a good summary. This is quite consistent with what Jesus said about the two commandments of feudal love and submission to the Father, along with loving His other servants the way He does. Do you see the parallel in thought?
Our biggest problem is that vast number of Elect currently trapped in non-covenant bodies, a form of church that is entirely too compromised with the world. It’s wrong to simply leave them there, but we must discern how God wants us to reach them. We cannot use the methods of the Harlot Church to rescue her prisoners. They must leave voluntarily, with a will to find the Father’s glory in ways they cannot already do.
It’s a careful balance between treating them as family and acting as if they are still lost in pagan enmity. In many ways, we shouldn’t care if their bodies and time are used in mainstream church activities, so long as their hearts are with the covenant community. They will eventually leave the mainstream on their own, so mainstream church membership is not really the issue.
We can trust the Lord to handle stuff like that. The one thing on which we can focus is loving them as covenant family. If the Lord does not use that to draw them out, that’s His problem. Again, The community cannot exist as intended until the individual is redeemed. Our focus is not on their bodies; that’s their mission. We focus on their hearts, and the warfare of the heart is not at all like that of the flesh.
If they don’t know they need what we have, we cannot give it to them. We should not attempt to sell it, as it were. All we can do is manifest it by how we discipline our own flesh. The Spirit must call them by building a flaming desire that drives them out of their bondage.
