Gathering to sit as an audience to hear great sermons and pay into the offering plate in every meeting allows Christians to assemble, display loyalty to a pastor while:
• avoiding discipleship
• avoiding letting our “light shine”
• avoiding face to face love of other Christians.
If that’s what a Christian wants to do. If that’s how we choose to hide while keeping a clear conscience… then its a great system.
The great commission applies to the ecclesia who had embraced the gospel of the kingdom as started by John the Baptist and fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
The Christians who don’t have that gospel of the kingdom within them should not feel the obligation to go into all the world preaching.
So some of us should lay down that ambition and walk away from the mic.
Large portions of the New Testament just do not track at all with what is on display on Sunday mornings in the vast majority of churches.
And when that gospel is recovered it will be obvious, Christians will meet like they met, they will love one another like they did. There will be equality among us like there was then.
And then what is called “the great commission” will apply to groups of Christians working together. Not to lone super-stars building their religious empires.
A test whether a person or group is (or is not) following Christ closely, is that they are able to put up with people they disagree with.
Fleshly, human, religious love just can not tolerate someone who disagrees with them, they want them silenced, ignored, and finally OUT.
Friendships end, the person is pushed away, and it quickly becomes hate if they disagree with them too directly.
Over time in groups any conflict is hated, and greatly feared, submissive compliant non-thinkers become priceless, (and then it evolves into only the compliant ones who bring money who have any value in a group). Compliance and money become the way to favor and promotion with “the leaders.”
This is human religion.
Hence Protestant denominationalism…
These behaviors do not emerge from Jesus Christ!!, instead they come from the evil one.
Over time the type of people promoted within a group determines its culture, more than anything else.
Is your “church” filled with compliant, shallow, unthinking and exclusive people? That should seem strange because our Lord Jesus is thoughtful, independent and accepting and forgiving. He walks right up to conflict without fear and with boldness, so should we. He directly taught against hierarchy.
This post was paraphrased from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book Life Together.
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