Unity & Disunity in the Church

Tim Challies at Challies.com posted twice this last week on the issue of unity within a church (“Satan’s Great Desire” and “How to Build Unity in Your Church“). As usual, Tim does a good job of noting the problem, rooting it to Scripture, and offering a solid biblical response to maintaining unity.

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:

Nuclear blast 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.

Ending the Descriptive-Prescriptive Battle Once and For All

Nothing infuriates me more than trying to use the Book of Acts to teach people how to live, only to run into some footsoldier of the descriptive-prescriptive battle. These folks love to put the kibosh on one mention after another of how the early Church functioned, particularly when someone asks why today’s Church isn’t functioning that way.

Their mantra goes like this: “Yes, the early Church did ___________, but the Book of Acts is descriptive, not prescriptive. Just because we see ___________ described in Acts doesn’t mean we have to make it a practice for us today.”

Really?

I tend to hear from those same people how God is not the author of confusion, but honestly, their position on this battle is one of the most confusing, illogical, anti-intellectual streams of thought that exists in contemporary theology and Bible exegesis.

Consider this:

1. The unconverted did not do ___________.

2. The Holy Spirit comes into the lives of the unconverted and converts them.

3. The converted now do ___________.

I don’t know about you, but if someone goes from NOT doing something to doing it after the Holy Spirit has changed him or her, it would seem to me that ___________ is near and dear to the heart of God.

How, then, is it irrational to think that we should be doing ___________ today? Yet that is what the descriptive-prescriptive battler wants to make into an issue.

Here are two classic examples of descriptive actions in Acts that these folks can’t abide for us to emulate:

And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
—Acts 2:44-45
And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts…
—Acts 2:46

Christians who wage war on the descriptions above do so because they can’t stand to consider the implications of meeting together daily in each other’s homes for meals and fellowship, while also giving up their hard-earned stuff so that a brother or sister can have a need met. Where I come from, there is a description for that: hardheartedness.

Doesn’t it seem obvious that a group of people who once did neither of those things suddenly started doing them once they were touched by the Spirit of God? Doesn’t that have any implications for us?

John Piper recently lamented how some Christians seem more pumped up about the latest film in theaters than they do about Jesus. Given the circles I run in, you can substitute electronic gadget for film in theaters, but you get the point. Jesus doesn’t seem to excite people as much as the inconsequential does, even when those people are Christians.

I would contend that the unholy mindset that seeks to diminish the implications of the descriptive portions of the New Testament is partially responsible for the situation Piper decries. Wielded as a club, that mentality beats down the very heart of what Acts is saying to us about what is good, pure, noble, and true. Acts depicts what is normative in the Christian life, and the reason it is so (and should be) is because the Holy Spirit of God is at the heart of the changes we see in the lives of people who once didn’t give a damn about the guy next door, then suddenly they’re meeting in that guy’s house and sharing Jesus together daily. And when they’re doing so, the world’s junk seems far less attractive and Jesus a whole lot more.

Instead, most of us sit passively in church for at most 90 minutes one day a week, listening to a select few people telling us how we’re doing life wrong, and here are some Bible verse pills to make it all better, and you better down them right now or else. But folks, that dead way of living is the fruit of taking the vitality of Acts and wringing the life out of it because we’ve listened far too long to the voices that tell us, “Well, ___________ is descriptive and not prescriptive.”

It’s the sour grapes we now eat and explains why we love Jack and Jill more than Jesus.

(If you truly want to be grieved by this descriptive-prescriptive fruit, see “God-Connections in Church Are Rare, Study Says.”)

The Word for 2012: Community

Without fail, the Lord provides a burden for me each year that I have typically shared here. Over the last few months, the one aspect of our walk with Christ that has been most apparent and problematic has been the way we American Christians practice community—or fail to practice it, as the case more often is.

A few questions regarding community that never seem to be far from my thoughts:

Do we meet together and practice community in the same manner as the Spirit-directed early Church did?

Do we value community in such a way that we ensure that the spiritual gifts of individuals in the church community are allowed to operate when we assemble together?

Do we lay down our selfish selves so that we are always thinking of what is best for the church community?

Do we maintain a belief that corporate sins are just as heinous as individual sins and live in such a way as to address and correct them?

Do we ensure that each person in our church community has his or her needs met, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?

Do church leaders identify and stoke the gifts of people in the church community?

Do we maintain a “flat hierarchy” leadership style that ensures that leaders are considered equals in the church and not an elite class within it?

Sadly, in most churches today in America, the answer to most (if not all) of those simple questions is no.

Changing those answers to yes will be the major theme of Cerulean Sanctum in days to come.

Stay tuned.