Third Millennium Church

Spot On - The Essential Conflict

The difficulty of this blog is that by squeezing out one article at a time between thesis revisions :) you might miss the big picture of what I'm trying to do. I want to use this column to talk about the big picture, and to generate some analogies that might be useful in seeing what we are doing. It all has to do with what I call the essential conflict, the conflict that has shaped human history since its inception.

Throughout history the essential conflict has raged between the people and the priests. The pattern is the same across many different cultures and thousands of years. God reveals himself to the people, so that they can get to know him. Whether voluntarily or by force, the people form a priesthood. At first the priest tries to help the people get to know God, but soon his humanity takes over. He craves the power of being the intermediary between God and man. He knows the sins of everyone in the village. He makes it more difficult to get to God by adding his own requirements. The priests band together to form a power structure. This power structure starts accumulating power, prestige, money, and sex. The priests hold the keys to the kingdom. Rebelling against them is the same as rebelling against God. In three generations or so the priest no longer makes it easier for people to find God, but harder. He has become the gatekeeper, and only those he smiles upon achieve eternal life. We can't criticize him; he's doing an important job after all. His needs are different. He speaks the word of God.

Then, someone stands up to the priests and says "No!" to their power structure. Depending on how integrated the priests have become with the political system (or, in the middle ages, when they were the political system) this person can be imprisoned, killed, silenced. Another rises. Soon, after much sacrifice and suffering at the hands of the priests, a group of people breaks out of the system. They want access to God without priests, so they create a community that has direct access to God. They are often persecuted, called witches and hunted down. This type of revolution has happened over and over in history. The bible contains the record of several such revolutions: Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, to name a few. And if you study church history in the slightest way, you'll see this pattern repeated over and over.

Jesus came to end once and for all the rule of the priests. He gave us all direct access to God, without any intermediary but himself. Being fully God, Jesus proved that he could be a priest without the human temptations to power. Think of his trials in the desert. God himself became our intermediary. So true religion, the true worship of God, needs no priest. This is the radical message of Jesus, and why the Pharisees ultimately killed him. They, after all, were the priests of their day.

It is true about human nature that we will rule over one another if given the chance. We will always take the actions that benefit us, and if they screw over someone else, well too bad. We would expect this attitude in business or politics, and we would hope that such would not be the case in our religious lives. But it is. We are no different in church than we are in the boardroom. We are evil, face it. We shouldn't be trusted with each others salvation, and God doesn't want us to be.

Now, I've said that this cycle has played itself out over and over again. Just look at church history. A church rises in a flush of joy over finding God, power structures form, and soon the church is trapped in a human set of rules and games meant to enrich those at the top of the structure. Should we just consign ourselves to this truth? Maybe this is just what God wants?

No. I cannot believe that the creator of the space-time continuum enjoys seeing his people flayed alive by the priests in his name. If you've spent any time in ministry, you know the evil that relatively stable and sane people can subject each other to. I did it; everyone does it. It's part of the package. To be a priest is to inflict pain on others. Sometimes you'll find someone who avoids the worst aspects of a priest, but we all at one time or another end up ganging up on someone, or using our power for our own gain, or lying to our congregation to protect ourselves. I've had sweet old lady ministers lie to my face while scheming against me the whole time. The ministry is a web of schemes and infighting and one-upmanship. It's a horrible, filthy, ugly, wicked, petty, conniving world.

So, I'm not interested in just reforming the problems of the Evangelical church. Someone could do that pretty easily. At the moment the Evangelical church is integrating itself into our government, so pretty soon disobeying a pastor will not just get you thrown out of church, it will brand you as a terrorist. As America decays into a theocracy, it will become dangerous to criticize the church. You'll notice that among the sins decried by the Evangelical church, violence is absent, because you need violence to run a police state. Blackballing people who are not Evangelical Christians already occurs at the Army base where I work; I'm sure it's even worse in private industry. Of course, as the Evangelical church gains more power, they become more corrupt. Soon, any sort of revolution in the church would be a revolution against the government; the two are rapidly becoming the same thing. The priests are winning in America, and now they have nukes.

Thankfully, governments come and go and one day they will sift through the sands of America looking for artifacts, trying to learn our language, arguing over our texts. But God's people will still be around, joking about what significance the female shape of the Coke bottle had in the sexually repressed 1950s.

No, what is needed is a fundamental shift in what the church is, to finally break us out of the cycle of priests vs. people.

This is what we must do: we must reshape the church at its very core, so that it has nothing that causes men to want to use it to dominate others. This is difficult, but I think it can be done. At the moment there are several aspects of the church that make it useful to someone who wants to control other people:

1. Conformity. Everyone in a church thinks the same way. People who think differently are ostracized.
2. Ignorance. Authority in the church comes from the leadership's interpretation of the Bible. They claim they are "just reading" it, but anyone with a bit of skill in reading can see where they are wrong. Thus, it becomes important to lift up the priest as the only one who can "properly" interpret the bible. Most people don't have the time, so in their ignorance they trust the priest.
3. Large-group Shared Experience. Church services are designed to promote the loyalty of people to something larger than themselves. This is a fine thing, but normally the "something larger" is God. In this case it is the church hierarchy and the sect.
4. Sloganeering. Sermons are designed around slogans that require little thought and cannot be critiqued: "Give it all to God!", "Sola Scriptura!", etc. Thus people do not learn to critique an argument, only to repeat the slogan. Critical thinking is discouraged in the church.
5. Hell. The threat of disobedience to the church hierarchy is eternal damnation. Sure, they'll say that people outside their sect go to heaven, but they don't really mean it. Only by following their doctrine and obeying their rules are you assured of heaven.
6. Manipulation. People in church are used to responding to manipulation, whether it is for the collection, the sermon, or appeals to work in the nursery. Thus, they tend to be more malleable than unchurched people. That plus ignorance is a big benefit to someone who wants to control people.

The church makes an excellent base from which to rule the world. And that's what many men have done over the centuries. We must change this, by negating the effects given above that make a church so tempting to those who want to control others. Perhaps by doing this, we can break the cycle of priest and people by once and for all destroying the need for priests.

"You will be a kingdom of priests, and a royal priesthood."

The way that we change the church to be less appealing to the controllers of the world is the task of this site. It's a tough one, but I think we can do it. If we don't the church will be condemned to another millennia of men using it for their own means. We can't let that happen.

Why We Need a New Ecclesiology

How do normal, happy, well-adjusted people turn into the wicked liars that inhabit most Evangelical churches? The people are not the problem. People are just people. We all have our faults and sins, and we all have our moments of kindness and good will. No, the reason that wickedness pervades in the church is because of the church structure, because of the way that men have set up the church.

Jesus saved his worst insults and accusations for the men who ran the church of his day, the Pharisees. You have to understand that this was not religious rivalry; at the time Jesus identified fullly with the Jewish religion. Jesus' problem with the Pharisees was an internal Jewish dispute. He was not upset with the Pharisees because they did not accept him as Messiah, he had not made that pronouncement yet, but rather because they had corrupted the leadership of God's people.

I make the same claim against the current Evangelical church. The leaders in the current church have corrupted God's church and have caused God's people to become narrow, selfish, wicked people. The leaders are snakes, whitewashed tombs, who work tirelessly to make a convert and then cause her to be further from God than she was before she walked into their church. The Pharisees are the true enemies of God.

Strong statements, but I only repeat what the Master has already said in the same context. And, considering the Evangelical church is in such a state of failure, the need for strong statements has come. What's that, you say? The Evangelical church is strong and growing? Ah, you've made the mistake of confusing outer appearances with the inner soul. Allow me to become more explicit in my critique, although I do so love the language that Jesus used to tear down the evil that men do.

1. Theological Failure. The church bases its theology on poor hermeneutics, causing them to inject their own theological preconceptions into their teaching. The primary focus of this failure is an abandonment of salvation as a free gift for the modern doctrine of salvation by belief. In other words, you are saved if you agree with certain key doctrines, not whether you trust in Christ or not.
2. Moral Failure. The chuch glorifies the sins that it commits: pride, envy, greed, lying, gluttony, etc. and treats them as if they were righteous acts. Then it takes sins that no one in the church wants to commit: homosexuality, drinking, smoking, etc. and makes those into the worst of mortal sins. By whitewashing their own sins and overstating the sins they don't commit, the Evangelical church sets up a system of lies and hypocrisy that it uses to punish those who disagree with them.
3. Political Failure. More and more Evangelicals have become convinced that a Christian may only be a Republican. This causes them to render unto Caesar what is God's, and to become serfs of the Republican power structure. Since they have sold out to a human institution, their theological positions have been compromised. For example, churches that think smoking is morally wrong continue to support the tobacco industry because the Republicans say they must.
4. Ecclesiastical Failure. The church is supposed to be the gathering of believers, nothing more, nothing less. As currently instituted, the Evangelical church is either an extended social club with all the baggage common to that institution (black-balling, politics, ostracization, peer pressure) or a small band of the "Elect" who know the secrets of eternal life and who pity the rest of us who will burn forever in the fires of God's anger. Churches which are loving, accepting, humble, gracious, and forgiving are rare and ephemeral. Perhaps, for a season, a pastor who knows the real deal will be able to make the church what it should be, but he is soon overwhelmed by the money, the power structure, or the men who hold the lease.

These failures are due in part to a bad ecclesiology. The church structure has been modeled after a business, with a CEO and board of directors who manage the money and allocation of resources (people). As with any business, profit is the ultimate goal. In the context of a church the profit is not in money, but in popularity. The goal of a church is to have as many people as possible in that church. One would think that if all the Christian churches truly were interested only in spreading the gospel that they would not care which church a person attends. This is not the case. There is always the undercurrent that only one's particular sect really has it "just right". So the goal is to get everyone into our church. Every Pentecostal church rejoices when a Baptist "converts" and comes over to the right way of thinking. And vice versa.

Since the goal of the church is to attract and retain a population, the church uses all the normal systems that humans use to control one another. Peer pressure ensures that everyone in the church thinks and behaves the same. Ostracization is the threat used to keep people in line. If you start to think differently than the church, there will be hints that you aren't welcome, with the final stage being a full disfellowshipping. For most people, it's easier not to rock the boat and so they stay and swallow whatever they must.

Businesses have expenses and so the church must institute a tithe to pay for the staff and buildings it needs to keep everyone in one place. This is important, and why the weekly church service is mandatory. The church would have a harder time controlling people if it did not build a sense of shared experience, which is what the weekly service does. If you look at the way an Evangelical church service is structured, the high point of the sermon is either preceeded or followed by the collection. Obedience to the teaching of the church is reinforced by obedience to the tithe. When people invest their money in something they have a natural desire to see it succeed. This is the true importance of the tithe. Proof that the tithe is essential to the working of the Evangelical church is simple: if it's not essential, stop taking a collection. You won't find a single church that will do this. Their structure demands strict monetary obedience by the church population. Pastors know who tithes and who doesn't. Believe me, I've been there at the meetings where it was discussed. They try to play off the collection, as if it were a necessary evil, but in actuality it is a core part of their mechanisms of control.

So the church as currently structured has very little to do with the message of Jesus and the way the church was meant to be. It was never meant to be a monolithic power structure capable of building huge buildings and aggregating hundreds or thousands of people in one place. It was never meant to enforce conformity of doctrine or thinking. It was never meant to lift up leadership into a position of power over people. Finally, the church does not have authority over every part of our lives. I know pastors who think the church has the final say on who you marry, who your friends are, how you vote, how you spend your money, and what sexual positions are allowed. This must stop.

It is no wonder that with such manipulation in the church, that the people begin to be narrow and vindictive. They are under pressure to conform, and are probably hiding many sins behind their church smile. You'd lash out at someone who was different too in their position.

How must the church be structured for the next millenium? That is a question for the next article in this series. As a preview, the church will not be about buildings and staff and sectarianism. It will not be about conformity and money and power. In fact, for the church to survive the next millenium, it must be something quite different.