Did Jesus suffer and die to create some huge, domineering, cold ecclesiastical institution? Was it His plan to create an unfathomable political mess, a bulwark of legalism and demagoguery? Did He intend for us to spend all of our time and treasure and talents building huge stone edifices run by legions of pious, arrogant men who’d dictate who got into Heaven who did not? Really? Was this the plan? Contrary to popular belief, the Christian church’s first pastor was not Peter but James. His open letter to the followers of Christ lays out not only personal behavior and conduct, but a vision of what the true Church—the Body of Christ, you and I—should look like.
The
church should look like Jesus.
Most every photo I’ve seen of a black bishop depicts him stoic
if not scowling. Black pastors carry with them this plantation
mentality of equating strength with cruelty, and thus our
tradition of the stern-looking pastor. The more powerful, the
meaner he looks. Often, in our church tradition, the pastor
seems the least involved in worship. He sits there—Mr. Cool,
legs crossed, a disaffected look on his face—while the choir
sings, while the people worship. He hollers at us to worship,
but we rarely if ever see him worship. This is called piety.
It’s what we do because it’s what we’ve had modeled for us. It’s
the baggage we carry, calling it “tradition. Strength = cruelty.
None of it looks anything at all like Christ.
The church should look like Jesus. This simple and profound truth, said by Rick Warren
(The
Purpose-Driven Life), is the essence of our mission on earth.
The church, of course, is not the building or the Usher Board or
the Trustees. The church is the people. The living, breathing
people who gather together to worship God and to love one
another. The Body of Christ should look like Christ. The church
as an institution has almost never, ever, looked like Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ is not divided within Himself. Jesus Christ
is perfect. Incorruptible. Merciful. In practice, the
institution of the Christian church has rarely been any of those
things. Most of us know little about the bible and even less
about the institution of the church. Many of us go there every
Sunday, but we don’t know why we do the things we do. It irks me
to no end when churches serve communion without explaining what
they are doing or why. When communion becomes just another
ritual on just another day. Our older congregants are locked in
shackles of tradition, fighting, maneuvering, scheming and
otherwise working against younger people and new ideas. That’s
mostly out of fear: the older we get, the more aware we become
that there are fewer days ahead than there are behind. For me,
personally, this helps me focus. I am dramatically more
effective in my forties than I ever was in my twenties.
Christians who fear death simply puzzle me, as life’s end brings
with it a promise from God, one we trust in and rely upon. The
church, as an institution, is a looming reminder of death. In
essence, the church was born out of death as it symbolizes
victory over it: the resurrection and the new world beyond.
There used to be a practice within the Catholic church that you
could literally buy your way out of hell. Or purgatory—sort of
Hell’s waiting Room. For the right price, a Catholic bishop or
pope could grant you an indulgence, a kind of get-out-of-jail
free card. In the fifteenth century, it was commonplace for
Church officials to buy their rank within the complex church
hierarchy by making massive contributions to the church. Presto,
you’re a bishop. Money was power and power was money. Rather
than hold a bake sale or car wash, the church, in 1509,
commissioned a fundraising campaign to finance the renovation of
St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome by selling indulgences—I suppose,
running a sale on escape from hell.
People came to confession presenting plenary indulgences for
which they’d paid good silver, claiming they no longer had to
repent of their sins, since the indulgence (a formal sealed
document) promised to forgive all their sins. This was one of
the earliest forms of hucksterism, the magic prayer cloth and so
forth. A local German priest and professor of theology became
enraged at this rip-off, and posted a now-famous document on the
castle church in Wittenberg. This document was called The 95
Theses, and the priest’s name was Martin Luther.
Luther was outraged that they had paid money for what was theirs
by right as a free gift from God. He felt compelled to expose
the fraud that was being sold to the pious people. This exposure
was to take place in the form of a public scholarly debate at
the University of Wittenberg. The Ninety-Five Theses outlined
the items to be discussed and issued the challenge to any and
all comers. The document marked Luther’s break with Roman
Catholicism, which led to the Protestant Reformation of 1521
and, ultimately, to us; to what we do on Sunday mornings.
Our black Baptist evangelical church tradition
is largely
derivative of Calvinism (also called Reformed Tradition, the
Reformed Faith, or Reformed Theology), which came into being
during the Protestant Revolution. Breaking with Catholic
tradition, an Anglican pastor names John Smyth wrote a tract
titled, “The False Constitution of The Church,” in which he
expressed two propositions: first, infants are not to be
baptized, and second, that salvation is achieved through faith
alone, that scripture alone is the rule of faith and practice,
and that the local church should be autonomous—a group of
believers who gather as they will. This was a major rejection of
the legalistic, corruption-riddled empiric institution that
dominated the world at the time. It was a radical notion, that
we could go to God ourselves—directly, on our own—to seek
forgiveness of sin and to find salvation. Our pastors did not
have to salute Rome or be entwined with all of Catholicism’s
theocracy. The Baptist tradition spread quickly through the
seventeenth century, arriving in the New World with Roger
Williams and John Clarke in 1639. U.S. Baptist congregations
split in 1845, disagreeing over issues like slavery, mission and
doctrinal integrity, becoming the Southern Baptist Convention
and the American Baptist Churches of the USA. Most black
churches split from the Southern Baptists after the Civil War,
forming the National Baptist Convention in 1895.
A lot of what we do today has no real biblical model. We do it
because we’ve always done it, because mama ‘nem done it, because
Uncle Buzz done it that way. But few of us have much of an
understanding of the early church, how it was organized, how it
was governed and financed. They didn’t have a building. They met
in homes, usually those of women , such as Lydia (Acts
16.14-15,40) in Phillipi; Nympha. in Colossae ( Col.4.15) and
Chloe in Corinth (1.11). Here they prayed and shared in the
Breaking of Bread. The first Christians were Jews who still
observed Jewish tradition, continued to worship in the Temple in
Jerusalem and the Synagogues. Worship began with prayers in
praise to God, and the Shema, (confession of faith). This was
followed by readings from the books of the Law, the singing of a
psalm, and a reading from the books of the Prophets, which was
explained by the rabbi. The service ended with a collection for
the poor, a prayer, and a closing psalm. The doctrines of the
apostles brought the Early Church into conflict with some Jewish
religious authorities. This eventually led to their expulsion
from the synagogues.
From Acts and Galatians (1.18) James was the leader of the
Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem. Members of the Church
in these early days believed that the end of the world was
imminent as reflected in Paul's earliest letter to the
Thessalonians (1Thes. 1.10, 2.19, 3.13, 4.17) and so they were
exhorted by Paul to live in such a way that they be ready for
that day (1 Thes. 5. 6- 22). In these earliest days of the
Church there was no rigid government in Paul's mind, just a
family of believers led by elders and served by deacons.
Two events quickly changed the locality of membership of the
Church: the first was the martyrdom of Stephen and James, the
son of Zebedee, which led to the dispersion of those early
Jewish Christians throughout others part of Judaea, into nearby
Syria, and further, perhaps even to Rome (e.g. Prisca and
Aquilla); and the second was the conversion of a Pharisee known
as Saul, a zealous persecutor of Christians. Saul had put a
great number of Christians to death, and had overseen the
stoning of Stephen [Acts 7]. The early church, therefore,
confronted fear and death on a daily basis. Their early days as
an almost hippie commune—living together, sharing their
resources with one another—came to an end as many of them fled
the city seeking safe haven, taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ
with them.
There was no choir.
There were no ushers. In the earliest
churches, there were no seats. You stood on your feet for hours
as prayers were offered up, psalms sung, stories told.
The early church was called The Way. Attending the gatherings
involved risk. Christian worship was seen as a privilege of the
believer, not as something we skip whenever we can avoid it,
something we have to be dragged to. A believer professing his
faith risked everything to follow The Way, to follow Jesus, and
that faith transformed the entirety of their existence. The name
"Christian" (Greek Χριστιανός) was first applied to the
disciples in Antioch, as recorded in Acts 11:26.[5] Some contend
that the term "Christian" was first coined as a derogatory term,
meaning "little Christs", and was meant as a mockery, a term of
derision for those that followed the teachings of Jesus.
The post-apostolic period concerns the time after the death of
the apostles (roughly 100 AD) until persecutions ended with the
legalization of Christian worship under Constantine the Great.
In the post-Apostolic church bishops emerged as overseers of
urban Christian populations, and a hierarchy clergy gradually
took on the form of episkopos (overseers, bishops), elders and
presbyters (shepherds), and then deacons (servants). But this
emerged slowly and at different times for different locations.
Clement, a Bishop of Rome, refers to the leaders of the
Corinthian church in his letter Clement I as bishops and
presbyters interchangeably, and likewise says that the bishops
are to lead God's flock by virtue of the chief shepherd
(presbyter), Jesus Christ. The New Testament writers also use
the terms overseer and elders interchangeably.
Over time, religion, in the form of overseers layering
increasingly complex hierarchies over the simplicity and beauty
of the early apostolic Church, evolved to co-opt the message of
Christ into a tangle of legalism and corruption-prone
demagoguery, leading ultimately to religious wars where ethnic
cleansing was blessed and ordained along with looting,
barbarism, rape, torture and murder of events like the
Inquisition, along with utter nonsense like charging believers
to forgive their sin.
Demagoguery and legalism are still alive and festering in our
church tradition today. Most churches I know have layer upon
layer of Who’s The Boss hierarchies, ridiculous administrative
practices—many which treat the pastor as a mere hired hand,
unbiblical bylaws and organizational structures. Often, the
people who most stridently seek leadership roles within the
church demonstrate the least evidence of the fruits of the
Spirit and, therefore, are the least appropriate for those
roles. While the meek, the humble, the broken, the most gentle
and Christlike among us rarely make themselves known in any
gregarious or obvious way and, therefore, tend to go unnoticed.
Our churches, for the most part, resemble the pre-reformation
mess much moreso than they do the Church Christ intended to
found—the family of believers meeting in homes, sharing meals,
praying together, telling stories, growing in grace. With not so
much concern for who is on what committee and Who’s The Boss.
What happened to that church?
Sometimes, we can become so busy, even in our well doing or
well-meaning, that we miss the forest for the trees. Which is to
say we become so busy with the work of the church that we fail
to educate ourselves about what the church is supposed to be.
These massive organizational charts with all of these so-called
ministries and auxiliaries who don’t actually minister to anyone
but are political and social sub-groups existing for not much
reason beyond somebody’s ego.
What if the pastor was just a guy? What if knowing God was as
simple as a friendly gathering in somebody’s family room? What
if we could stop stressing over the light bill and the building
fund and the pastor’s salary and how to fix the roof. Jesus
didn’t die so we could stress folk out about fixing the roof.
This week, read the Book of James and gain some perspective on
what the church is supposed to be, and who we’re supposed to be
because of it.
Christopher J. Priest
1 May 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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