In it, people discovered the fullness of Jesus Christ.

People gathered together daily, ate their meals together, and shared the Lord’s Supper in an atmosphere of joy and celebration.

People gave, and without man-made limitations. They gave everything they owned, everything they were, and every spiritual gift they had received from the Lord, because they loved each other, so no one among them lacked for anything.

People saw themselves as equal partners in the Faith, but each with unique gifts, so that no one would contemplate surviving completely in Jesus without the others. And no one among them lorded anything over any other, but each was was seen as an essential part of the whole.

People acknowledged that the only hierarchy among them was that some had been in Jesus longer than others, so those had grown deeper and had more to contribute, with those more mature ones afforded the honor they deserved. Jesus alone was the head, and all others were fellow members of the Body, each one a saint, priest, and fellow sojourner.

People brought  their spiritual gifts to each assembling together, with each person encouraged to share what the Spirit was doing in and through him or her, as the Spirit of God Himself directed.

People were in Jesus, who was in the Father and the Holy Spirit as well, all experiencing the fullness of true fellowship and intimacy.

And among the people love ruled, with each person lifted up by the other,  joined in unity in the Lord. And that love was so compelling that nothing in the world could compare, not even a little.

I had a dream, and it seemed so strange, like nothing I had experienced before.

And I wanted it to be true, and real, and present right now.

But it seems like just a dream.

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

I Had a Dream

But what is left unsaid in those two posts is what has nagged at me the last few days, especially since I believe the topic of the year is church community (and the sudden interest in community seems to be widespread now).

Tim says that a lack of mutual love within a church is a major reason for disunity. His answer is for those in the church to use their spiritual gifts to serve each other.

You’ll get no arguments from me on this.

However, I believe that the problem we have with disunity within churches is more insidious than a lack of love.

What I share below is my experience as a trained observer of churches and people. I can’t give you a lot of Bible verses (yet) to back my observations, only that I believe that what I write is going to resonate—especially with seasoned Christians who have been wounded by their church experiences.

First, a clarification. How does disunity in a church manifest?

What most people see of disunity itself is anger, frustration, resentment, people leaving the church in numbers, and church splits.

Personally, I don’t believe that the majority of this disunity and its fruit can be traced to the Smiths not loving the Joneses. For the people in the seats on Sunday, not getting along with other people in the seats is almost never their reason for manifesting the bitter fruit that leads to people leaving the church.

What I know of people who have left a church or of a church that has split, the reasons are of a different sort. The leavers and splitters are far more likely to note the following failures:

1. Church leaders failed to address “sticking points” within the church despite others (usually nonleaders)  noting those issues.

2. Church leaders failed to respond to pleas for personal help.

3. Church leaders failed to nurture other people’s God-given spiritual gifts (or even purposefully stymied them).

4. Church leaders failed to communicate vision and direction to the rest of the church body.

5. Church leaders failed to recognize they are fellow brothers and sisters of equal stature with the rest of the people in the church and therefore failed to lead humbly.

Picked up on the pattern yet?

Most solid people (as opposed to church hoppers/shoppers) who leave a church or most churches that split do so for one major reason: church leaders failed.

This is not to excuse those who are not church leaders for their personal culpability in that failure, but it demonstrates an enormous, glaring problem.

If church leadership failures are a major reason for disunity in a church, perhaps the problem is not one of love, as Tim Challies notes, but of the entirety of the way we allow our churches to be led. Perhaps the models of church leadership and proper church functioning we have fallen into over time are not the models depicted in the New Testament. Perhaps this is why church leaders fail so often, why so many people leave a church (or Christianity altogether), and why disunity reigns.

Sadly, almost no one within the North American Church wants to deal with this problem because it means a total rethink of the way we do church and would prove too threatening to a vast number of people.

But if the Church is to do more than survive, thriving means dealing with that problem.

And that is going to have to take a whole lotta love.

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

Unity & Disunity in the Church

One of the things that has set me off lately concerns several posts and comments I’ve read from folks under the age of 40. I have no axe to grind against younger Christians, but when such folks start talking about how someone else isn’t carrying his or her cross correctly, I get furious.

The problem of judging someone else’s ability to carry the cross is a huge one on the Internet. The amount of presumption on the part of these judges is staggering, particularly when that judger has lived a golden, carefree life in which “my cross” consists of mistakenly receiving a mocha latte instead of the ordered cappuccino from the barrista at Starbucks (or whichever coffee dispensary is trendiest among the self-righteous).

The wisdom to discern anything about another person’s life can only be gained through time and the Holy Spirit. Bury a parent or two. Have a child wind upon the wrong side of the law. Suffer a divorce. Care for a chronically ill or terminally sick family member. Adopt a special needs child. Suffer repeated job losses.

There’s a reason why the eldest were the first to drop their stones in John’s chapter 8 telling of the woman caught in the midst of adultery. The eldest were the first to understand what Jesus was saying. Age buys people rights, but that’s largely because they’ve experienced enough vicissitudes of life to know that sometimes they need to withdraw their dog from the hunt.

A prime example of how the young often get it wrong is the pile-on concerning stupid things Pat Robertson said to a man wondering if his pursuit of personal happiness trumped taking care of his wife, who had Alzheimer’s. Was it okay to divorce her and marry someone else?

No, it’s not okay. And the youngsters quoted Scriptures and got riled up and foamed at the mouth and all the other things they tend to do to make sure EVERYONE knew it was not okay. To let everyone know how right and just and perfect they were by letting their righteousness shine before all on the Internet.

But the funny thing about holding onto the rock when the elders have already dropped theirs is that the rock cries out against the holder. And it does so because the holder lacks the wisdom of empathy and basic compassion. To the fool, the path is always clear and obvious. Needless to say, the fool often winds up on the wide path that leads to destruction.

The ugliness that is self-righteousness starts from frame of reference. In the case of judgmental people, they rarely wander outside themselves to ask what it is like to be the person on trial. They don’t have enough rotten experiences in life to have any kind of empathy. They lack that perspective of Jesus, who saw lost people as more than just another face in the “bound for hell” crowd. He saw people as being more than their disease. More than anything else, He saw how He could be there for others.

The great unanswered question in the Robertson fiasco was not about the rightness or wrongness of the reply to the man asking the question about his wife, but why that man asked it in the first place. People who lack widsom and empathy never ask those kinds of deeper questions when confronted with a problem situation. They instead rush to the obvious question with the most broad, simplistic answer. The problem with that mentality is that life is found in the narrow, more difficult way.

While self-righteousness and judgmentalism rush to the approved mob answer, empathy and wisdom draw people to ask how difficult it must be for others to carry the cross.

Anyone who has spent a couple decades watching a spouse slowly lose his/her mind endures a cross unimaginable by most. Not everyone can afford the kind of professional, third-party care that allows the remaining spouse to put some distance between the horror of that cross and the rest of life. We know the simplistic answers, but it’s the daily living in the shadow of that cross that should have us clapping a hand over our mouths before we presume to speak and to reveal our ignorance.

No one wanted to help Jesus carry His cross. Someone had to be compelled to do it.

We can talk all we want about right and wrong. We can point fingers at weasels, liars, and cheats. We can let the world know just how right the Law might be. But for most of us, we are far, far away from anyone bearing a difficult cross.

All the Scripture study in the world cannot trump helping another bear the cross. I don’t care how right you are or how well you divide the Scriptures. It all comes to naught if you are too preoccupied to shoulder for a time someone else’s crushing cross.

Young people, here’s my word for you: One day it will be you. No one gets out unscathed. Be careful what you speak to others bearing up under the weight of the cross. Because you might very well have a massive one dropped on you, and when you cry out for help, you better pray that some kind soul shows you more compassion and aid than what you offered to others.

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

Cyrene Surpasses Berean