Let’s catch up a bit.
The trail through the woods is going quite well. After I finished clearing a nice wide path across the bottom of the draw, I turned up the hill into the woods on the east side. Almost immediately I found a natural trail, perhaps something used long ago. At any rate, in just two hours of light cutting, I got across the draw and at least a hundred yards into the woods. Up on the ridge, there isn’t much to clear, so I’ll make fast progress until the next open cut. Oh, and the deer are really loving the original path.
I hate boasting. I don’t really need recognition. And while money is useful, it’s not important in most of my considerations. Something I read today about being a “missional emergent” (reference to the emerging church movement) queried just how much outreach was happening in my life. I’m not counting prospects, converts, etc. I’m just doing what I can with my abundant free time to put my service skills to work. Aside from the trail and it’s usefulness to others (including wildlife), I have been helping an aging blind man. At least once each week, I ride my bike several miles to his house and run errands, help him read his email, his snail mail, fix little things here and there, etc. Sometimes I help other folks with other projects. Does anybody else see and know? Don’t matter. I’m not in it for that sort of thing. I’m just being obedient to God, fulfilling the high demands of Love God and respect your fellow humans. It’s not much, but it’s what I know to do right now.
Every time I think I’ve found a trustworthy organization, upon further investigation, I always find it full of major moral holes. We realized this week the way we do church fits almost perfectly the definition of the emerging church movement. So I began searching in our area for other churches using that label. Only one comes close, some monster mega-church. We had already visited them and found it not a good fit. But I still wanted to investigate their rather free offer of support and so forth. Can’t use it. Then I discover the senior pastor is real touchy about criticism of his organization. It’s one thing to explain why you do what you do, but quite another to make the tone of that explanation too defensive and biting.
What happened to humility? Why do so many people think it’s necessary to take themselves so seriously? Don’t like what I write here or some of the things I do? Take a shot, by all means. It’s pretty hard to get me to delete your comments. Same goes with any other site where my writing appears. I have nothing to lose by criticism, since nothing I do depends on good advertising and brand defense. Defending a brand is what I saw in that senior pastor’s comments to others who suggested things weren’t quite so spiffy in his organization. He’s really touchy when anyone mentions he’s been drawing over $100K annually for quite a few years now. It’s not a sin to be paid that much, if you ask me, but he has no good answer, as it appears he’s the one who demanded it directly from the board.
You can define the word “church” to death, but the functional view is to see it as two entities. While on the one hand it should be a manifestation, a point of focus for spiritual activity, on the other hand it remains a human organization. Spiritual stuff has one set of guidelines and expectations, but the human organization part of it is under the Covenant of Noah. You need a spiritual leadership team in the church, but the body of folks need organizers who aren’t necessarily the same people. So the pastor is a spiritual leader, but he should avoid dipping into the organizational stuff. The New Testament makes it pretty clear you can have women lead in the organization, but not in spiritual matters, for example. So the rules are different for the two realms, which happen to be, presumably, overlapping in a single entity. There is no way to have a hard fast separation between the two, but we should be careful to distinguish where possible. It’s not as if organizational leaders can’t be spiritual, but their primary mission and concern should define and set limits on what they do. Everyone’s brain needs to be trained to shift gears quickly as to what parts of each issue fall under one area or the other.
So in our efforts to build a community of faith, an emerging church body, we are still pretty much going it alone. It’s vaguely possible there is some existing church out there which could tolerate what I teach and how I operate, but it is so unlikely, I just don’t plan for it. I’m still considering how we’ll let folks know about our vision, but I feel certain that will manifest soon enough.
