We continue the thoughts from yesterday’s ruminations about leaderless religion.
What was described is the necessity for online relations. When we move things into meat space, there are added complications, even though leaderless religion is the ultimate goal. I’ve often noted the Western conservative notion of laissez faire economics is a cover for greed and tyranny, and can only lead to fascism in the secular state. More control is not necessarily better, because the fundamental flaw is the modern state itself. When churches emulate modern state structures, habits and assumptions, you cannot possibly be obeying God.
We note the churches in the New Testament did have structure and leaders, but the matters of faith itself were not dictated. When Paul had a truly serious problem, he could write a lot and be rather heavy-handed, but the only leverage he had was God binding the elders of the body to his leadership. You could easily choose to see that as the good old boy network, but Paul himself set the example of moving out of the synagogues and holding church next door. Nothing kept the church members from doing the same thing on the human organizational level. Paul had no real control in that sense.
What kept them in place was the necessity of family. We simply don’t have that in Western Civilization. The immediate nuclear family we understand, but only until the kids are approaching independence. The entire cultural foundation offers no support for keeping things warm and friendly by necessity; it’s purely optional. Further, the culture presumes conflict is the norm. The world in which Paul did his mission work was far, far away — not so much geographically, but culturally.
There was no civil government involved in family matters. That was utterly abhorrent, and any government official would know instinctively his life was at risk if he tried it, and justly so. Even among cosmopolitan Greeks it was recognized the extended family household was your very life. If something separated you from family, you had nothing. You had better get yourself another family-like safety net real soon. The ANE culture in particular understood family-by-covenant relations. Marriage is an obvious example, but there could be a hundred other reasons for establishing a covenant with other folks. All covenants were family-making in that sense, as it was a binding of persons as if in blood kinship.
In a church, the only appropriate New Testament image is establishing an extended family household by covenant. As this deals with eternal matters, it becomes the real family you acknowledge. There are tensions, of course between your ultimate loyalty and real-world obligations. You remain bound by previous covenants; Paul wrote Christians should avoid divorce from unconverted spouses. But the general aim was a complete transfer of loyalty and identity to this other nationhood, this other Realm of Heaven. Rome recognized membership in nations, both within the traditional land borders, and throughout the empire. A nation was a huge tribe, a family, and social issues were handled internally. These folks in the First Century understood this instinctively, but we find it utterly foreign. So when we mention the ostracism of someone who refused to leave their sinful habits outside the door, this isn’t simply hard feelings, this is tragic loss of everything.
The entire teaching of how to lead and maintain the church families of the New Testament assumes such, and also assumes not everyone is mature. You simply cannot have a church which is pure, undefiled by those who are still struggling to get that other-worldly mystical mindset. If we could have that, there would surely be no leadership, except for the brief duration of events which require a single focus of action. The whole point behind Leaderless Resistance is the same: to raise everyone to the level of competence and commitment that no one person is essential, but anyone can lead for a particular event. A great many philosophical movements have crashed and burned on deciding who would lead. When a church must of necessity consist of those who aren’t quite ready, leadership in that sense is required. When there are so many children, someone has to be the daddy.
In the New Testament, the first churches were careful to separate the daddy from the preacher. Throughout all of ANE history, you had elders and you had priests. (Civil governments came and went, mostly in the form of empires.) Only the Messianic image could combine the two; otherwise you had to keep them separate. A fundamental flaw in Judaism was when the role of High Priest became political during the Inter-testamental Period. The proper division between the head of household and the spiritual leader was broken, and we see it carefully restored in the first church. Those seven men with Gentile names were appointed to become the daddies for those who were born and raised in Gentile lands outside Judea, because everyone else had their long-established household leadership, which is what “elder” means. This was the social control, the “government” of the church. The spiritual leadership was a separate question.
The spiritual leadership — apostles, pastors, teachers, etc. — were the ones working for a leaderless life in Christ. The spiritual goal was always to make everyone entirely competent and able to relate freely as a member of the “spiritually adept.” The elders were the ones struggling to keep things under some semblance of order until individuals got there, but with the added surety there were always more who weren’t there. The church functions as an incubator. The real action for which we grow wings is outside the church meeting. Matters of faith are ruled by the nature of mysticism; matters of organization come somewhat under the Laws of Noah. Yes, those elders preached and the apostles sometimes wrestled with organizational issues, but you’ll note the difference was in role and task, not nature (being) or actions (doing).
We have precious few facts about what it was like before the Flood, but we know the Covenant of Noah was to prevent the need to do it again. Reading between the lines, we can reconstruct some of the assumptions. If the Covenant of Noah assumes “government” means tribal, then what we had before that was something else. Civil government assumes an organization against threats, which naturally includes some necessity of internal order keeping. But Noah also assumes a rather strict separation between that and social issues. There had been no leadership of any kind, neither civil nor tribal. The first sin after the Flood was not the wine, but the lack of respect Ham had for his father (the text uses a euphemism for homosexual rape). When nobody is in charge, pre-Flood chaos ensues. The idea of a church keeps it in suspense between the complete and utter filth of the Fall and the recovery of Garden of Eden.
So we are required to have organizational structure and leadership. As we enter a period of major tribulation, where the whole civilization is coming apart at the seams and things will be reminiscent of the days of Noah, and people are cavorting with demonic powers and complete lack of respect for social order as God defines it, we need to keep our eyes on what really matters. The organizational leadership of a church is not the final matter. It is obligatory where there is a gathering, but the Bible assumes it is familial, not corporate. In modern times, civil tyranny will attack the organization; it can’t touch the faith behind that organization.
To the degree your personal religion requires structure and leadership, it will be vulnerable to destruction or compromise in the days to come. Many religions today are already far gone down that path. God is not going to protect institutions and organizations. He will most certainly keep faith alive. We of the Tribulation Church endeavor to build and keep a leaderless religion. We know it cannot be fully realized in this fallen world, but we know that’s how God works.
