Church Admin: Rationale

Despite my affinity for the Internet and what I regard as the rising Networked Civilization, I will be the first to tell you it’s not enough. It’s not enough as a basis for building a solid revelation community on this earth. We can use the Internet as the message protocol in the absence of propinquity (a fancy word meaning close together in time and space). We cannot use networking as a replacement for propinquity.

Over the years on this blog I’ve tried to teach the discipline of hearing from the Holy Spirit. The hardest thing we do in this direction is learning to silence the voices inside our heads that do not originate with God. This is not something easily taught online. It requires hanging out with people who are better than you at distinguishing internal noise from the clear voice of Heaven. While I can tell you clinically that it is a matter of bouncing things off of your convictions, it takes a good bit of face time to clarify how that works individually. This is just one critical lesson that requires a meat space congregation, among others.

My convictions tell me that we are on the threshold of a time when we will need the awareness and skills necessary to form churches that answer to the teachings of Christian Mysticism. My worst nightmare is that someone should become confused about my intent and somehow imagine that this is the birth of yet another sectarian denomination. Christian Mysticism is not about content, but method of gaining content. Our efforts here are not aimed at establishing a peculiar theology in the typical sense of what we’ve all seen so far. We are seeking merely to return to the fundamental principles of life itself as revealed in Scripture. Such principles will most assuredly affect how we do church. As the world around us changes, whatever comes at us is best faced with the ancient truth that hasn’t changed since Creation.

That we are facing some big changes in our world is obvious to anyone capable of understanding what I teach here. I shouldn’t have to convince you, dear reader. Just what will change, in what way, and how much is all likely a matter of educated guess, at best. It’s the wrong question anyway. We who seek to walk by the Spirit are more interested in how He is reshaping us and what He demands of us whatever the context. That the renovations in our souls are fitting us for future service should be all too clear.

So whatever it is coming at us, I am convinced writing this book on Church Administration for the Christian Mystic is a vital necessity. It’s not as if I expect a sudden rush of affiliates and friends grabbing onto this and planting new congregations across the globe. That may well happen, as I anticipate a significant shake-up in the established mainstream Christian religion. However, you can do choose to embrace this teaching wherever you are, regardless of the broken reality in which you abide. We live with a foot in Two Realms and the tension between what is versus what should be will never resolve itself until Our Lord returns to redeem all things. It simply is not possible to jump into the ideals from scratch. We approach this task with a full awareness — an expectation even — that our ambient reality may never quite match the vision. (Edit: The book on Church Admin ain’t happening, but I did write a book that included the ideas.)

But we need that vision. The whole point of having churches in the First Century was roughly equivalent to synagogues, in that they were incubators for moral change. Spiritual change is something between you and God, and it’s not something anyone else can really see. But moral change is obvious to those who see God’s divine moral character. People bring all their humanity and darkness into a place where the light of eternal truth shines, and each individual begins making the journey from darkness to light in concert and with support of others making similar journeys. The idea of church is to promote moral change, not demand it all at once. The act of doing church itself has to grow with the moral condition of the people.

Thus, we do not establish something organizationally immutable, but something living and dynamic in its very nature and structure. We do not reason our way to some ideal structure and drive the people into it, making various members fit the image. Rather, we work from a model that starts with the people and builds on their commitments. The planning and operations arise from what optimizes the resources at hand. The goal is not growth in numbers, budget and facilities, but growth in individual moral awareness and commitment. We could just as easily dissolve the organization at any time when it cannot fit the human need.

So the task is to grow morals; we do not assay to grow the church organization. The core is not ideas, ideals and organization. Rather, organization arises from the people involved. We do not build a structure to which people must sign on and treat as some manifestation of God. The church has no goals outside the souls of the people. Rather, the church is a response to a very real moral need in the people.

There is a minimal structure offered repeatedly in the New Testament, and it’s obviously based on what prevailed in the Old Testament. It rises on the necessity of two offices: pastor-priest and elder-chief. The former is a ritual and spiritual role; the latter is organizational. Whether the congregation is literal family is not material to the question. They are covenant family first and foremost. Their shared DNA is spiritual. God intended that these families should operate along certain broad ideas that can be fitted to any context.

It is those broad ideas we examine in this study. While you and I can easily observe how churches today might give lip service to some of the concepts stated above, the concrete results are still very much according to the Western Enlightenment traditions. We have to be careful because too many words have been perverted and twisted to give a church and its organization the wrong shape. A major element in this work will be redefining the terms.