The Covenant of Christ is both very simple and very hard. Submission to Christ as Covenant Sovereign is simply outside western experience, so it’s very hard. Yet the concept is rather simple, as is His command that we love each other as He does. That points to the Cross, the death of our fleshly natures. The implementation of that gets complicated real fast.
Believers in community should be the world’s experts at living in tension. There is absolutely nothing churches must accomplish. Nothing in Scripture requires us to build up large organizations with substantial investments in real estate and facilities. There’s nothing in Scripture about increasing budgets.
Indeed, the whole concept of budgeted giving is alien to Scripture. It’s nothing more than a taxman’s approach to coercing contributions through browbeating and manipulation. In the Old Testament, the only thing on which one tithed was agricultural production. Cash earnings were not tithed. The general principle is that you gave voluntarily “from the increase” — a concept itself arising from agriculture. If the Lord prospers you, then you honor Him. If He does not prosper you, then the issue is not giving, but finding out what He requires for restoring His favor.
Notice something: People who experience the power of the Holy Spirit of God always share freely. It’s part of the humility and love that His Presence evokes. It never fails. The giving itself is way more important than the resulting church budget. The inherent worldliness of the current common budgeting system in churches is scandalous, an embarrassment to the Lord’s name. At no point should anyone ever even think about, “How can we increase offerings?”
Again, it’s not about institutional growth; it’s about the depth of moral and spiritual development of the people involved. The whole task of any church is building love between each other. The reason the New Testament churches didn’t have denominations was not because they were all of one doctrine. It was because they knew that being together was the whole point, not some imaginary orthodoxy. There was a flexibility about what people believed.
Yes, Paul addressed factions within the body, but was quite willing to simply let people go when their distinctions disrupted the community. There are things you don’t transgress; most of the Old Covenant based on violating underlying moral truth inherent in Creation itself. If you ignore those boundaries, you are fighting reality itself.
The First Century Christians had a much stronger conceptual distinction between doctrine and theology. Doctrine means understanding what Christ taught without intellectual embellishment. Some questions will never be answered to our satisfaction. This is why our Radix Fidem community works so hard at recovering the Hebrew mindset of Jesus and His disciples. The fundamental assumptions of ancient Hebrew people were radically different from those of Americans today. We keep demanding definitions that they never would have dared to ask. The question was never a matter of what’s in your head, but what’s in your heart.
That job is hard enough without complicating it with analytical structuring so common in the West. We don’t need precise intellectual definitions; we need guidance in the one and only task of living in harmony with each other. An awful lot of biblical doctrine leaves intellectual questions hanging by design. Feel free to organize it internally so that you can implement the requirements. Just keep in mind that your internal rational considerations may not work for someone else. There is no need for uniformity in some questions.
Under the cover of intellectual organization is the awful temptation to take yourself and your talents too seriously. You must learn to live with the irritation of something seeming to you so crystal clear and reasonable, while it doesn’t work for someone you are obliged to work with in keeping community alive. People can embrace you without accepting your reasoning; it’s not a rejection of you.
Your church should not be an institution organized to accomplish concrete goals. A church does not require the kind of formal order needed for businesses to profit. Church is a family household, including people who are born sometimes very different from you. The mandate is to care for them the way households are morally obliged to handle varied temperaments and drives. Moment by moment, you must keep alive the kind of negotiated peace that allows kids to thrive and develop into functioning members of the household community.
And their only function is living together in the peace of God. Yes, there are boundaries and exclusions. The atmosphere should encourage people to play along until they simply cannot. This should be paramount in the minds of the elders and pastors. Don’t follow leaders who cannot get that. Shepherds are the folk with some expertise on keeping the flock healthy as a whole.
