To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.  (John 1: 12-13)  And after being born again, we became part of the local church and we started to doubt this great and momentous event. Maybe I am exaggerating a little bit here…but not a lot. I know because I have been there, and talked to a lot of you, people who have stories about problems in the church and how it shook your faith.

The church has been and always will be under attack from the outside and the inside by our enemy. Governments and false religious systems continue to aggressively attack the church today from the outside. And the New Testament is full of defenses of the faith from false teachers on the inside who continue on as active today as ever.

But we also have to deal with our own sinful selves in the process of sanctification. I want to look at how our own sin, even as true believers, damages the church. I want to look at three areas where this sinful erosion is pushing us away from our connection with God and the body. I also want to offer a solution. I write this not because I have it in for the church. I don’t. I love the church. It is the body of Christ.

#1 A culture of control

 For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?  For when one says, “I am of Paul,” and another, “I am of Apollos,… I Cor 3:3-4

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Mat 18:4

We are always in danger when we make the church about one person and proven loyalty to that person the definition of success in the Kingdom of God. When alternative ideas, constructive questioning, and a lack of accountability are missing there is often a line of wounded people following.

There is a very fine line often between great leadership and a cult of controlling personality. The easiest way to determine the difference is asking where is the demand for loyalty lying? Is the demand of loyalty to Christ and the Bible or to the program (no matter how good and accurate) promoted by the personality? Does the local church just talk about itself and its great pastor and appear fearful of other leaders, or does it see itself as part of the universal work of Jesus?

#2 Community approval as the definition of success for the Kingdom

I believe a lot of church attendance decline recently is not because churches had to “meet online” for a while, but because they had the wrong definition of success. Many churches were looking for approval of their community as their definition of kingdom achievement. The idea being once the community approves of us as “good folks” and examples for the rest to follow, when we help it meet its needs, then they will gladly just walk right in one day and sign up for Jesus.

But then when the community began to demand the church accept nonbiblical Marxist and postmodern satanic imaginations to be considered acceptable, and the government wanted to dictate what went on inside the church, many once well-intentioned leaders had a hard time shedding their love of community approval when the community turns on them.

They followed after their local community trying their very best now to get the Bible to agree with whatever new standard of good was made up. Of course, this caused a lot of pain and suffering amongst followers of Christ who were perplexed, that these new standards, were not in line with the Bible. I can give you a list of people and pastors that have shown up on doorsteps of my current church licking their wounds from this fallout.

Of course, it doesn’t take a Bible scholar with a doctor’s degree to understand the words in John 15:20, Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will persecute you also. It is important to remember that in the West people are almost never persecuted for saying, “I love Jesus” but they are persecuted for acting on the statement, “I believe what Jesus and his appointed emissary Paul said in the Bible is true about reality.”

#3 A union mentality

For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith; or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching; 8 he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:4-8)

What is a union mentality? It is a thinking that goes like this, “I have done my time, and I have earned my place of recognition in our organization, and I deserved to be there due to time served and effort put in irregardless if I am the best person to serve in a particular role. We get our place in the church, our group of friends, our place in a ministry, our clique and we develop tunnel vision locking others out of our little zone and group because it is more comfortable.

One main reason I believe there are church plants meeting in schools across the street from a little used churches million dollar buildings is because of this. At one time, they were demolishing Casino’s in Las Vegas to build new ones in their place for the large part to break the union hold on employees in the old building. Many churches say they want new people to come, but they really don’t…unless their related…or were an old friend the pastor’s back in the day etc.…

Why do these things happen? It is because of our sinful fallen nature. And it is why we need Jesus Christ. We like to idolize people, like community approval, and the security of a union mentality. What do we do about it? Well…we don’t get discouraged, and we change our habits and keep the focus on the right thing.

When we are committed to the basics of faith. This is Bible study, prayer following after the Lord’s prayer, being peculiar people on the lookout for good deeds and truth, and remembering our blessings with thanksgiving, we will find ourselves too busy to line up at the altar of the next hit book or be crushed when our favorite personality takes a misstep, focused on what God thinks about us and not the culture, and on the lookout on how we can use ours and others skills and abilities and not be about cliques.

Let’s not surrender the church to our own sinfulness and discouragements and sit home licking our wounds and complaining. Let’s get in the fight and change things confessing our own faults and developing better focus. Jesus said in Matthew 5:20,   For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. With this we can love the church confessing that Jesus is the Christ and “the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

Doug

The words of British poet Robert Abrahams say it well, “For some men die by shrapnel, And some go down in flames, But most men perish inch by inch, In play at little games.”  Our goal is to identify the little games and put a stop to them and put the right weight on the right things.