The use of polemics implies a vested interest in the outcome of the debate.
It’s one thing to engage in polemics; it’s another to simply dissent and go your own way. The latter is the signature of the heart-led way. There’s no reason to correct someone else unless they specifically place themselves under your covenant leadership. Our covenant community is tiny, so there’s almost nobody we could remonstrate with on anything.
I reject the idea of church as an institution. To me, that’s a pale man-made shadow of what Christ intended. About the only similarity between a genuine covenant community and an institutional church is that both exist primarily to self-perpetuate. The primary difference is that a covenant community is nearly impossible to eviscerate the way you can take down an institution. You would have to literally kill the members in a covenant community to remove its power and influence over the membership, because its whole identity is the shared heart. There’s no way to objectify things enough that someone could come along and restore it from written documents, for example.
A covenant community exists solely where the people involved agree in their hearts to have one. It’s utterly personal. There can easily be successors in the leadership roles, but the community changes as soon as the baton is passed. It must; that’s how it’s supposed to work. If the new leadership kills it, that’s the way it goes. Only God can bring a community together, and only God can keep it alive. It can remain active in human terms after its soul departs, but it ceases to be a “church” as far as the Lord is concerned.
But a covenant community exists to breathe that same life into every member. The whole point is to aggregate the moral resources, to inculcate the same moral essence in each person. The study and practice of moral truth is the whole point. There is no other mission. There are no objectives or accomplishments to worry about. Yet, staying exactly the same is also death. People must adapt in how they react, how they undertake to shine divine glory into the fallen world.
The moment you institutionalize any part of this, it dies. Divine glory is entirely personal in nature; it’s God and you together as family. The covenant exists to give it physical shape, to provide boundaries of privilege. The covenant is alive in itself; it is personified in the Risen Messiah. The leadership can guard the community, but only the Lord can guard our hearts and minds. Nobody but the Father decides who belongs to Him. His anointed leaders simply decide whether you belong to the community.
It’s not a public accommodation; it’s an extended family household. The shared DNA is entirely moral in nature. We could say “spiritual,” but the way church folks use that word, it comes with a lot of false baggage. The whole idea is that you know when a community is your family because your convictions say so, as do theirs. Convictions are your ultimate personal source of moral truth. Yes, you are responsible for searching and knowing what your convictions say.
You are part of a community that searches to know what your shared convictions require in the context. There’s a give and take, but the structure is tribal feudal. You have an organic leader and ritual leader. If you can’t follow the appointed shepherds, stay out of the way. This is the pattern Our Lord lived with when He walked the earth. It’s the pattern His apostles taught. But no flesh carries the fullness of His authority on this earth. Walk by your convictions; departure is not apostasy. Departure is pursuing the Lord to another mission calling.
No one has a vested interest in the outcome except the Lord.
