Moral Tinkering

Christians seem to want to do this all the time.

I was reminded of it, listening to a sermon by Rob Jones, one time rector of St James Turramurra (I don't endorse the current silly sermon series title 'man up for God', by the way; puerile!). In mentioning Puritans, he observed that they generally failed in their objectives for a couple of reasons. One was that they sought to legislate what they saw as godliness.

Christians still do it today. I call it moral tinkering.

The 'debate' on 'gay' marriage (really homosexual marriage) is an example. The talk by churchmen of 'ethics' classes in lieu of scripture in public schools is another.

Now, I don't really care what the world does with its idea of marriage and nor should public Christians. For Christians its a distraction. No matter who is married to whom, for what reason or by whom, if the are not followers of Christ, they are not in his family. Our mission is to proclaim the gospel, not to encourage cute, but etermally useless moral conformity. If the ship is sinking, I don't care where the deck chairs are and neither should any other Christian.

The debate on 'ethics' was similar. No Christian churchman made the point that no end of ethics classes would not deal with people's inability to do as even they would want to!

So what happens when ethics fails?

Christians would point to forgiveness and salvation in Christ. All the world can do is shrug its shoulders, and maybe throw you in gaol.

Its a bit different when it comes to the death penalty, free access to firearms and abortion. These kill people and remove their opportunity for life and future encounter with Christ. All should be stopped. That's not moral tinkering, that's part of proclaiming the gospel and acting mercifully to seek opportunities for people to join the family of God.

Poverty of position

Quote from David Brickner in this month's Jews for Jesus Australian newsletter:

...in the open market place of ideas, surely it is the poverty of one's own position that leads to the desire to stifle the debate"

That goes particularly for the dirt squad (materialists), who want to promote the fiction of evolution by suppressing contrary views.

The anti-leader

I came across this piece on a church website on leadership. Now, you may know how I hate the use of this non-biblical concept, making of a type of action a static role.

But I wonder if the notion of 'leader' has any applicability in the church. After all, the church has servants, not leaders; we are all lead by Christ. The implication of 'leader' is that they know where we are going!

'Leadership' is about the one; service is about the others. Henry Mintzberg touches on this in a FT article on the subject.

So, I sent this to the church in question:

The conceptualisation of leadership in church life that I read in your blog seem to me to be at odds with the way the church is portrayed in the NT. In fact, it looks like a complete inversion of the notion of the church as a body of believers whose head (source) is Christ. As soon as you talk 'leaders' you talk the individual, inevitably, at the expense of the church as a body.

To think that a church needs a 'leader' installs a concept that is foreign to the NT theology of church. It uses a concept that is at best a modern misunderstanding of how a charismatic group 'works' (or that denies that it is charismatic, in the biblical, not the modern sense), and at worst uncritically apes the world in the installation of a paganistic hierarchy where there should be none.

In the NT, the church is a community, indeed, a family, where gifts are distributed for the mutual growth and edification of people working and living together in love. A leader at once demolishes this notion and makes of the church an organisation with someone, or a small group, who commands it, takes responsibility (in an organisational sense) and is not primarily a servant undertaking a role in a particular context.

Nowhere in the NT do I see an 'archon' mentioned in the church, which is the ancient world's equivalent of the 'leader' that comes to us from the secular world. The world of 'one is more important than the many', a world where political structure, whether in business, politics, or other social groupings is the default ordering mechanism, and social influence or the imperatives of the one are prime. This displaces the considerations of love, service and the promotion of others for a world where the leader is the front (usually) man, the one with the prestige, the one who calls the shots and sets the pace, if not the total mission.

I can't think of anything further from the church, or more likely to make the church a passive shell of what it should truly be: a mutually supportive and responsive body of serving believers.

Leaders are anti-humility, where as the notion of servant is pro-humility.

I think of the program of the church in the 1980s, when 'ministry' was often the theme in church 'development'. Ministry is where we seek how we are to serve, how we are to put the other ahead of ourselves, and how we are to express our love. Those we today would call leaders now appear to be the locus of ministry, and a magnet for prestige and adulation, at least by the secular media and institutions.

But we do not have leaders, we have people who serve in various ways and at various times, in various contexts. Some as teachers, some as pastors, some as administrators, etc. No 'leader' here, except that the whole church does the deciding, and the acting. It is the church that has presence in the kingdom of God, not 'leaders'.

Its well time that this was straightened out and we forgot about borrowing our structuring terminology from the hubristic world of business and affairs, and rather judged that world with a way of being community that showed up its puffery. Even the piece on 'anti-leadership' misses the point, I think, of the biblical passage cited, and makes of a structure, what was an organic and participative set of relationships...and, anyway, Peter was an apostle. We don't have them today in they way they were then.

Now, instead of 'leader' I'd like to see churches, and Christian organisations (ministries?) use Christian titles for their contributors: organiser would be good for people who organise things, convenor for those who bring people together for a task or activity, overseer has a biblical warrant; I think moderator also has a functional ring to it (apologies to the Presbyterians), facilitator is possibly OK, and administrator is directly biblical. Anything but the turgid puff of worldly organisations were titles are used to garner prestige!