I would love to discuss this article in the context of the discussion here:
I am a 3 (on the fourish end of the 3 spectrum) and we came back for a furlough from our work in Mexico to find that over the last 5 but especially 2 years the church I have loved and attended for my whole life shifted from a B church to an A church and we no longer have a place there. We are going to begin our “conscious uncoupling,” as Gwyneth Paltrow once said of her divorce, and try to keep our lifelong relationships with some people in tact.
I found the breakdown in this article so helpful for processing my own experience and “place.” I really need to find me a C church.
I really liked the breakdown as well. I also feel that I fall into the 3-4 range but think what I mainly look for is a type B church. In my mind I rationalized A as far Right and C as far left and B is a sort of centrist range where you’ll find As and Cs that are both closer to C . Though for me there are far more specific areas of doctrine and lifestyles that matter in what church I call home and send those I’m studying the Bible with too than political stances.
Though the congregation I attend now is definitely more of the A and 1-2 type set up thst can be very frustrating. But it’s the Bible Belt of southern Alabama. But they are usually pretty well diverse as far as race goes. But even the majority of African Americans, Asians and Hispanics people seem to fairly conservative. Like I still hear black men and women think that prison creates gay people. Most are YEC and the second largest group is OEC that tries to do weird days equaling geological era type stuff and they believe genesis 1 was a delegate account from genesis 2 and that humans were created fully formed, but everything else evolved.
But they are really good at visiting the sick and helping keep people accountable. If you don’t go to church you’ll get calls from people checking on you. They do this project list so like if your vehicle is messed up they have mechanics from the congregation check it out and people will donate tools of you don’t have them and so on.
Hope you find your type C church and get through this okay. Maybe it will make you stronger but it must be very stressful. Never doubt that you here are the good guys in all this.
That article does a good job of describing the situation the church is in. I am a pretty solid 3, with a little lean to a 4, so maybe a 3.2. In a way that is disturbing as it seems the middle is a difficult place to be. My church is one of those that will continue to try to be a big tent and hold things together, which is worrying also as it appears that is really not a tenable position.
What the article really did not seem to offer is a solution. It seems that the author feels churches will change and people will gravitate to where they feel comfortable. That is probably correct.
A big part for me is that I simply feel that I have no other options for a few reasons.
When I read the Bible I see the verses about don’t give up fellowship, submit to your elders ( overseers ) , sharing things in common and about orderly worship. The new testament seems to paint a picture of disciples coming together in local assemblies to sing praises to god, pray for one another, help one another, help the overseers and deacons, and study scripture. You don’t really see these self thought lone wolf Christians. For a fact it seems the only time you see potentially lone wolf disciples is when they are being punished through disfellowship where they can’t even socialize with their brothers and sisters in Christ unless they repent.
The other issue going off of the first one is that those are simply the congregations where I live. If there was a CoC with predominantly liberal leaning Christians with elders who promoted evolutionary ecology and so on I would definitely be going there. But they are not. There is one of about 11 Christians with an elder 2 hours away that I visit a few times a year but it’s just not practical for being my home church. I guess it’s like if you lived in the desert and loved nature. You would learn to find beauty in the dry heat even if you would rather be marching around in a bog.
The last thing is possibly the most important aspect. S just like we don’t see lone wolf Christians we also don’t see secret Christians in the Bible. We are specifically told not to be like covered lamps. We are told to bear the fruit of the spirit. We are told to reach out to the lost. We preach to those who are in darkness and baptize them into Christ. But it does not stop there. They must continue in truth and righteousness. They need not only spiritual support but often they have physical and emotional needs that must be met as well. A few months back I was studying with six men. Shared the gospel, and over several months they decided they wanted to accept Christ. I was studying with them mostly individually. It was exhausting. I was at Walmart at 430am on Thursdays to study with a guy who stocked bread there at 5:15. Then I would go home and leave by 630 for work. Go on a short hike and meet another guy at 8pm at this rose hiking trail with a lit up pergola for 20 minutes and then drive 30 minutes to my house. Once they did become Christians , and leading up to it , I knew they needed more support. They needed congregations near them. One guy was barely making enough money to care for his family. He was having vehicle problems. Financial stress was causing problems with his marriage. They were on food stamps and was considering getting a divorce so they could each file for various programs that somehow was supposed to result
In something like $700 more a month in help. But it all got avoided because the elder at the church knew that several of the members owned businesses and the guy was able to get hired on with a company and another man worked on his vehicle for free and got parts from a junkyard owned by a brother of someone in the church. They were also able to get into counseling .
By myself I could not have continued to help those people. I definitely could not have been able to find them all jobs, help get vehicles running and often working families where both parents work or it’s a single mother or father will find an elderly woman or couple in the congregation that can watch their kids for a few hours a few days a week so the people can hold down full time hours.
A congregation should be more than just a place people meet up once or twice a week and shake hands. Every member should be active in each other’s life even if just a little bit. It’s hard to be there completely just for one or two people. It’s impossible to be there for more than that and no way could any of us single-handedly help meet all the needs of 100+ people.
That’s what marriage and family is for … as I read in one article recently (Thomas Hart) … marriage (and I would add family) is God’s way of having us practice “being there” for even just one or a few people and learning the practice of love on them. It is a great love indeed that is successful even just in those smaller arenas and among small group settings. One person doesn’t single-handedly do it for any larger community; but they do link hands and arms with others in that community to all help in loving and being there for each other, as you so wonderfully relate with your shared experiences above.
It seems to me that Jesus’ way of loving the world was to gather around himself and love on just a few, training them to do the same then for later communities they would start, letting that love reach far and wide. We’re still learning to reach.
If you truly want to reconcile, then I think the first step is being willing to consider the possibility that you might be wrong. Not admitting that you were wrong, but contemplating that there was chance that you were. G. K. Chesterton said “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” If you can manage to imagine that despite all your good intentions, your efforts to understand the circumstances, your convictions of what God would have you do, you were mistaken all along… If you can do that but still see yourself as an imperfect but well-meaning disciple of Christ… If you can carve out that space of forgiveness for yourself in your own mind… then step out of it yourself and imagine your brother or sister in that same space.
The real question isn’t “How can we be one again?” The real question is “Do we really want to be one again?” Is it worth it enough to us to actually follow “the course illustrated by Christ’s example” and endure all the s**t coming from the people around us… yet love them regardless?
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
I (and my father, @paleomalacologist ) are probably closer to a ~2.7 on that scale. We are in a type AB church, with mostly type 1.3 to 2.2, but definitely some ~2.5-3 (about 15%, or so–but that just means “our family plus a few other people”). The local area (think nearest two counties) is essentially an A to B-like mix with more 1s and 2s, a good number of 3s, and a very low number of 4+.
Good stuff, @Ron_anon But difficult. I was at a bible study last night studying
Daniel, and in the past where God humbled Nebuchanezzer, At the end this subject of reconciliation came up, and I made the comment that the main thing keeping us apart was Neb’s problem of pride. We have pride in our positions and hold to them even when the cost is our relationships. Several agreed, but one or two came back with saying the problem was “fear” and that was what caused the division. Sigh.
In any case, I agree that we should accept that we may be wrong, and even if we are not should be willing to put that aside and reach out in love when possible.
I shared that article on my Facebook page and am interested in how my more 1-2 friends are going to react. It will probably be crickets, as we really do not seem as a church community to want to openly discuss substantive issues, but will be interesting anyway…
I agree the question of “do we want to…” is a big one. It is big in my mind at present. Not so much with church at present, as we are sort of a type B church at this point anyway, but with parachurch organizations like bible studies and service groups where the interactions are more personal and the divisions greater.
My older brother did well as a contractor and was always worried about who he could trust and locked things up well. But when he was younger he would often brag about what he’d picked up at unguarded job sites.
I suspect those diagnosing fear as the issue were feeling that most keenly themselves.
Mark, while this is about church community, I see the same type of divisions in secular society as well. Perhaps secular groups are already a little more sorted into like minded people, so may have less problems. I suspect your gardening groups are fairly homogeneous politically. However, I sure in groups where diverse populations come together, the same problems exist outside the church. The obvious one is families. Any thoughts?
The parachurch question is going to be interesting (painful) to watch. My own organization is dealing with the fact that the faithful donor base and the people they hope remember them in their estate planning are moving toward 1 and the young people they are trying to recruit and equip to serve are moving toward 4. It’s becoming an unbridgeable divide, in my opinion. You can’t have all your training and missiology in the 3 zone and all your fundraising trying to “sell” your mission in the 1 zone, especially when the 1s are becoming increasingly hostile to immigrants, Muslims, the poor, and the whole concept of social justice work, and you are trying to be an effective development organization serving marginalized populations. Good luck.
Yep. And they went out from us because they were not of us. Not wanting to be reconciled is as antithetical to Christianity as anything I can think of. If one doesn’t want to be reconciled, one doesn’t belong in a Christian church in the first place.
No, that’s a pretty toxic idea. People are allowed to speak prophetically to their local bodies of believers and say “You have lost your way. I’m not coming with you.” There is no Christian mandate to be in unity with people who are focused on all the wrong things.
And that’s not wrong, because “fear” is just another form of pride. Fear is a response to threat, and “threat” is basically “anything that I really don’t like”. But God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of self-control.
It is very troubling indeed. Are nation states any longer viable? It is causing rifts in my family as well, particularly with my one sister but also with my cousins in South Carolina with whom I’d just reacquainted when we came out for that total eclipse a few years back. Whereas differences inpolitical orientation and education always needed to be danced around now I find much less willingness to bother and I confess the efforts I used to make regularly with my sister I much prefer to avoid now. It is sad. But I’m much more hopeful that we’ll eventually get past this as a family than that we can do so as a nation.
I am seeing a lot of fear, but it’s not of COVID, it’s of losing power and influence and admitting accountability for their part in sinful, damaging systems. I agree it’s pride.