Don't know why I chose that title for this post, perhaps I'm still a bit jet-lagged.
So, I met with my friend Brian yesterday (it was supposed to be our mentoring session, but we ended up taking the time to just catch up) and one of the things he mentioned was that some lady had apparently attended our church and then went out and flamed the pastoral staff in a post to
CRN (
http://christianresearchnetwork.com/?p=1455). In the process of searching for the comment (OK, that may be my gossipy-
ness coming through...) I found the following blog thread:
http://christianresearchnetwork.info/2007/04/19/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-ingrid-again/. (Side comment: It's interesting that these sites both have the same
hostname. I wonder who 'stole' the
hostname to host on the other domain?).
After reading through these I was thoroughly irked and posted the following item (to the.info site):
I know I’m late to the discussion - I was literally out of the country the past few weeks – but as a member of Bridgeway, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this thread.
My first thought: Has anyone gone through this thread with the eye of an outsider? Is this the church of Christ? Is calling names - either from the “free-will” or “sovereign grace” camp acceptable? I mean, haven’t we all read 1 Corinthians? “I am of Appollos”, “I am of Cephas”, “I am of Christ”. It’s interesting that Paul didn’t say “Oh, you guys who are claiming to be ‘of Christ’ are the right faction”. No, his point was that we need to be united by our love for Christ, not divided into camps. I would add that our love for Christ, as well as a hefty dose of humility, should shine through in the way we defend the truth.
This leads to my second thought: If someone is concerned that my spikey-haired pastor (and sorry Russ you’re really not the spikey-haired one. That would be Lance. And I think Jeremy may also have you beat in the hair gel department, but I’m not sure) is leading Christ’s church astray, or has some other concern about something someone who names the name of Christ is doing, then why not use a Biblical model for addressing the perceived problem:
Step 1. Go to the one who is supposedly offending and bring the problem to their attention, with the loving intent of restoring them.
Step 2. If they don’t respond, bring in a couple of other brothers in the Lord as witnesses. Again, the motive has to be love: love of both God and your brother or sister in the Lord.
Step 3. If Steps 1 & 2 don’t work, THEN you bring the issue before the whole church. AGAIN, the motive is to restore, not “make an example”, of the offender. (Though one would hope examples for others to follow and/or avoid would come out of the process).
My third thought: You know, I don’t like *everything* about my home church, Bridgeway. But I don’t like everything about America, my wife, my kids, New Coke (I still haven’t let that one go yet), the second Becky on Roseanne, or even the 49ers (may they ever reign over the NFL). Seriously though, Bridgeway is a church full of - gasp! - people. Sinful people, no less. But, as I think Russ was saying (I could be misinterpreting him, we haven’t consulted on this), it’s better for us to be honest about who we are in Christ at this moment and then move forward towards more Christ-likeness in the power of the Spirit than to try to “keep the image clean” (apologies to Steve Camp).
Please note: I am *NOT* contending that we should sit around saying “I’m OK – You’re OK” while playing kumbayah, or advocating an approach of “Can’t we all just get along” at the expense of defending the truth. But we have to defend the *WHOLE* truth, including the truth that we’re called to love each other.
This brings me to my fourth thought: Why is it that we feel free to smack each other around in the name of “defending the truth”? It’s like we think: “Don’t worry Lord, I realize you are incapable of defending yourself and the truth, and given that you have given me an infallible understanding of every jot and title in your Word, I’ll just jump in and take a verbal battle axe to those who oppose us. (There’s room in the Trinity for one more, right?)”. It’s like we call “olly-olly-auction-free” and then just beat the tar out of each other and think that’s supposed to be OK. We can’t wait until people wander into error – or what we perceive to be error – so we can lop their little “heretical” heads off with apparent impunity.
If we love the truth, we’ll do what it calls us to do: speak the *truth* in *love*. We must realize that to compromise one is to compromise both.
