The Lies About Church Unity

13 12 2011

Tuesday Re-mix -

“…being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Ephesians 4:3

I am now more than a year past the half-century mark on this earth.  Quite the accomplishment, it seems to me.  When I was a teenager, I honestly never wanted to still be alive by this age.  It just seemed unbearably old to me then.  I have recently changed my mind about that.

I see a lot of things differently now.  I have developed a patience…a longer-term perspective on things.  I have learned that many of the things I thought as a young adult were just lies.  Here are some of the lies I have checked off my list as “learned” over the years:

If you can afford the mortgage payment, you can afford the house.

If you can afford the car payment, you can afford the car.

No matter how old you get, you’re never more than 90 days from getting back in shape.

You can work long and hard, or you can get lucky…lasting success can come either way.

When two good people get married, good marriages always result.

Lies, lies, lies…all of them.  In all these ways, I have learned that the same God who created the world in six days expects us to take significantly longer and work significantly harder to accomplish anything of real worth.

It makes perfect sense to me, then, that our job of “preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” in the church is a tedious, difficult, long-term job which we cannot expect to happen overnight.  Because we are talking about real, human relationships, this job is messy and complicated and takes lots and lots of intentional effort.  In short, our responsibility of preserving the unity of the Spirit requires that we disavow ourselves of a few myths.  So let’s get started, shall we?  Here are the lies:

1.  That unity in the church is God’s job and He will do it magically and miraculously if we will let Him. The truth is, God has already done His part.  He gave us his Spirit…the one true source of unity.  But we also have a job: to preserve the unity He provided among us.  That job is hard and never-ending this side of Heaven.  God’s miracle has already happened.  What are you doing to preserve it?

2.  That genuine unity merely requires that we identify a common enemy or a common goal. We learned this as a nation, when the “unity” we felt after 9-11 ended up being short-lived and just a few months later our country was more divided than ever.  Similarly, any church who thinks getting together on a building program is all they need to begin experiencing some unity is fooling themselves.  There are no such “shortcuts” to the difficult and messy job of preserving the unity of the Spirit.

3.  That unity requires that we all agree with each other about everything. That is not at all what being “like-minded” meant to the apostle Paul.  The New Testament church was literally filled with disagreement, even doctrinal disagreement (see Acts 15).  But Paul always encouraged them to learn to treat each other with respect and to create an environment for growth together despite their disagreements over difficult issues.

4.  That it is more important to be right than to be unified. I believe Jesus settled this in John 17 when He prayed for the future church.  He could have prayed for anything at all, including doctrinal purity (i.e., being right) as He envisioned his future church.  He prayed for unity.  Nothing else.  Just unity.  If we will learn to live in Biblical interpersonal relationships with each other and in right relationship to God, the doctrinal stuff will take care of itself…the Spirit will see to that just as He has seen to it for some 2000 years already.  But as history has shown us over and over again, the Spirit will NOT do our job of preserving the unity.

5.  That we can achieve unity, even if we are not a praying church. Let’s face it.  God has not promised anything to the people who do not pray.  A church which does not pray together is, well…not really the church.  Being in right relationship with each other requires being in right relationship to God.  And being in right relationship to God requires prayer.  It is not rocket science.  Scripture makes this one easy to understand.

Church unity, like anything else involving human relationships, is messy work…and hard work…and lots of work.  The questions are these: (1) Are you prepared to do the work?  (2) Have you believed the lies?

© Blake Coffee
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

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Categories : 5 Principles of Unity, Church Unity, Ephesians 4, Genuine Community, prayer

Does Church Size Matter for Unity Purposes?

6 12 2011

Tuesday Re-mix -

Ever been in the Lego store at the World of Disney?  It’s amazing.  They have HUGE displays of things built entirely of Legos.  It is impressive when you think about the time it takes to connect each of those tiny little blocks together, one connection at a time.

It takes time to do that.  It takes effort to make sure each connection is secure.  But the result is impressive.  And in typical American spirit, the bigger it is, the better it is, right?

There is much talk these days about bigger churches versus smaller churches.  When I first ran this post, Ed Stetzer had just posted this article about Spiritual Transformation in smaller churches, compared to larger ones.  It is a compelling conversation, to be sure.  He encouraged smaller churches to “celebrate your significance”…after all, isn’t scripture filled with stories of a very big God using very little individuals and groups to accomplish world-changing things?  He also points out how important it is for our people to have opportunities to tell their stories of how God has changed them.  His point is that spiritual transformation is just as possible in the smaller church as it is in the large congregation.

But what about church unity?  Is it easier to ”preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” in a smaller church or in a large one?  Is unity in any way tied to numbers?

Back to the Legos…

Unity in a church is nothing more and nothing less than having right, God-honoring relationships among the people of that church.  In other words, it is the individual connections between the people which end up reflecting either unity or disunity.  It is our ability to find Christ himself in one another which will determine how much “unity” we have in a church.

In that sense, then, it is very much like our Lego blocks. The structural integrity of a Lego sculpture depends entirely on the connections between the blocks, no matter how large or small it is. Where the connections are strong, the structure is strong.  Where they are weak, the structure is weak.  Now granted, the larger the structure, the more opportunities there are for brokenness in those connections.  And there may be some added stresses to those connections as a result of the shear size of the structure.  But still, the strength of the structure (i.e., the unity of the church) is entirely a function of the strength of the individual relationships.

Irrespective of size, where time has been taken to make those relationships strong, there will be unity for the whole.  And likewise, where there is no emphasis on strong individual relationships, the overall body will be weakened.  It is pretty simple, really.

I will note one other difference, especially when conflict comes: in a larger structure, depending on where the brokenness occurs, a larger amount of brokenness can take place without necessarily affecting the rest of the structure.  In other words, there can be lots of broken relationships in a large church before it becomes noticeable to the casual observer…there is more “room for error”.  So, as relationships continue to disintegrate, it may take longer for the larger church to completely break apart, just because there are so many more relationships to be affected.  Similarly, in a larger church, it is easier for an individual to “hang around” without ever connecting to another piece and perhaps never be noticed as such.  That, of course, is a “unity issue” of sorts; one I wish were not as prevalent as I know it is in larger churches.  The only way for a large church to stay unified is to continue to insist on the strength of the small groups and every individual’s participation in a small group.

But otherwise, the “big v. small” issue as it pertains to unity is pretty simple.  It all boils down to individual relationships, and whether your church encourages them, teaches them and holds them accountable…or not.

© Blake Coffee

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

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Categories : 5 Principles of Unity, Christian Accountability, Church Unity, conflict

Now About the Gifts of the Spirit…

29 09 2011

Now about the gifts of the Spirit, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed… to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.  1 Corinthians 12:1, 7

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.  1 Corinthians 13:1-3

I wish I could see exactly what the question was from the Corinthian church.  I mean, I wish I could know exactly how they reported their issue with spiritual gifts.  The mediator in me has watched Paul call out three of the four factions in that church in the first part of this letter (“I follow Paul”, “I follow Apollos”, and I follow Cephas”), and I wonder if the “I follow Jesus” faction was representative of the culprits here, because that is the way it comes across in so many of our church conflicts today where spiritual gifts are at issue.  Somebody is making a practice of doing something that is causing all kinds of havoc in the church, i.e., ripping the church apart, and their excuse is that “I am just exercising my spiritual gift…it is the Spirit of God Himself working through me…I am just following Jesus.”  I am troubled by that for several reasons, not the least of which is that spiritual gifts are ALL ABOUT UNITY and bringing the church together…not ripping it apart.

Despite Paul’s concern that we NOT be uninformed on this subject, I think we are.  Paul was kind of a “bullet point” communicator.  But he did not have the advantage of a word processor.  If he had, maybe he would have written his lesson on spiritual gifts more like this:

  • Spiritual gifts are not just abilities; they are the Spirit Himself.  The Spirit, you see, is the gift.  When the Spirit of God manifests Himself through a believer, i.e., “peeks out” at the rest of the church from inside a believer, we call that a “spiritual gift”.
  • Your spiritual gift is not for YOUR benefit at all…it is for the benefit of the church.  It is the Spirit of God working through you for the common good, “so that the body of Christ may be built up  until we all reach unity in the faith…”
  • Even though you should “desire” the greater gifts, you do not get to choose your gift…God does.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could tell God how He should manifest Himself through us?  Then again, wouldn’t that be scary?!
  • You may well have an opinion about what your gift is, but since it is a gift to the church and not to you, you probably do not see it as clearly as the church does.  I am always a little skeptical when someone tells me what his/her own spiritual gift is…I always listen a lot more closely when he/she talks to me about someone else’s spiritual gift.
  • If your “spiritual gift” is damaging your church (i.e., Christ’s church) or is dividing God’s people rather than bringing them together in unity, do you really think that is the Spirit doing that?  It may well be some perversion of a spiritual gift, or not a spiritual gift at all, but it is not likely the Spirit.
  • That God would manifest Himself through you differently than how He manifests Himself through me is not a bad thing…it is a good thing.  God’s idea of unity comes via diversity.  Strange but true!
  • Your spiritual gift, no matter what it is, can only be received by the church through the lens of personal relationships.  In other words, you may be the most gifted communicator of God’s Word alive today, but if the 9 people sitting in your Sunday School class do not know that you love them, then you have nothing to offer them…you are just a bunch of noise.
  • There are not just 5 spiritual gifts, or 9 spiritual gifts, or 14 spiritual gifts.  Be careful about numbering or categorizing or otherwise limiting the various ways God may choose to manifest Himself through a believer.  The lists of gifts mentioned in scripture are more likely illustrative, not exhaustive.

I am with Paul on this…I do not want to be uninformed when it comes to spiritual gifts.  These are some things I have learned so far, with the rest of a lifetime yet to go!

© Blake Coffee
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

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Categories : 5 Principles of Unity, Corinthians, Ephesians 4, Spiritual Gifts

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