Perhaps...perhaps...as a whole however...I have never shied away from the challenge...I bring the light.
Of course...and I agree...and I have not behaved like this...never really...I have faced it...that is why I became a pastor over two congregations...it's the structure that fails the people in my experience.
I was speaking generically, not specifically you, not singling anyone out. Since no one is perfect we all contribute in some way to the problem. It's as the old adage says: If we found the perfect congregation then we could not join it because it would then become imperfect
. I do not want to get far afield of the op but our individual and collective imperfection should be obvious to all (except, possibly, the deluded sinless perfectionist) because the entire epistolary is very much about the NT era Church's imperfection. Every single word of correction is proof of the imperfection. The commonly occurring Facebook meme, "
If Paul ever saw the Church in America, we'd be getting a letter," is true!
God has been calling His own out of the "church" because the "church" is not the house of God...just like most "Christians" are just that..."Christians"...they are not the "sons of God" that is a maturity issue...no one told them they were supposed to "grow up."
Tatwo...
I disagree and believe
that is part of the problem to be solved. Ironically, I consider the view just expressed a direct result of Dispensationalism, or modern futurism (which will bring me back to the op).
Theologically speaking, there is only one Church, and there has always been only one Church. The Church is those who are "
called out." This is generally understood and will be asserted for the purpose of this post, to mean "
those called out of the world into service of God through His resurrected Son." More succinctly, the Church is the body of Christ. Nothing more, nothing less. The Bible never uses the word "
church" (
ecclesia) in ways we use it nowadays. It's never used to refer to a building. Ever. It's never used to refer to any organization other than the body of Christ. We've done ourselves a huge injustice by assigning multiple meanings to the word, thereby creating ambiguities that should never exist and problems that are easily fixed simply by applying appropriate labels (even if we have to invent them).
Perhaps this is a holdover from Roman Catholicism, but that is not the current problem. In the 19th century the restoration movement fragmented Christians (not the Church, the body of believers), accusing large swaths of Christendom of being correct while each new sect postured and asserted itself as the pure version of the Church. Everyone needs to leave the Church because the Church is corrupt. Everyone must leave the Church and become a member of the Church of Christ because we're the true version of the restored Church (according to what we say is the NT era version of true Christianity). Everyone must become a Brethren, or an Adventist (or JW or LDS) because each of those pinheads wrongly and very delusionally imagined they were the restored version. The original leaders of the Reformation did not want to start new denominations. They want the RCC to reform. That was not the case with the 19th century Restoration Movement. They proactively declared the Church corrupt, and corrupt in way theologically impossible. The Impeccability of Christ was always thought to impute a certain impeccability on his body.
That changed in the 1800s. Nowadays, not only do we have a large number of Christians saying, "
The Church is corrupt! The Church is corrupt! The Church is corrupt!" but many also deny the Impeccability of Christ. Of course, it makes sense: if Christ is not impeccable then how can his body be so? HUGE foundational change in Christian thought, doctrine, and practice and now, almost 200 years later, the effect of that
ironic corruption is near completion. They corrupted the Church and got exactly what they'd claimed already existed. Now the word Church" has to use a lower-case "c" and be put into quotation marks. We have been deceived. We have been corrupted and our own kind did it to us.
Some denominations within the restoration movement were different and did not contribute to this problem to the same degree. The SDA, for example, maintained social action and involvement. At the other end of the spectrum, however, were the Darbyites. The early Brethren eschewed politics and social policy. Christians were to withdraw from the world entirely. The world was going to go to heel in a handbasket any day now and Jesus was coming to rapture all the
true Christians off the planet, so separate from the world and prepare for his coming! Of course, the word "true" was measured by sectarian affiliation, not whether one professed Christ salvifically. John Darby was especially severe about this, publishing pamphlets espousing Christian separation from worldly affairs. His views became increasingly extreme to the point that he criticized the Plymouth Brethren and formed his own sect, which he called the Extreme Brethren. The man was not a good influence of the body of Christ.
Three of the most foundational fundamental aspects of Dispensationalism are...
- The requirement to read scripture literally.
- The distinction between Israel and the Church, the belief in two peoples of God with two different purposes.
- The elevation of ecclesiology and eschatology over other Christian doctrines (like Christology and soteriology).
These are three of the precepts driving the Dispensational Premillennialists' op in every Christian forum on the planet - including this one. Because the modern futurist emphasizes ecclesiology (the doctrine of the Church) and s/he believes the Church is corrupt there is a need for the Church to prepare to leave the planet. Coming out of the corrupted church and joining the pure version was the first step in helping know who was going to get raptured away.
That is the basis for rapture theory.
That is the basis for this nonsense we have to leave or come out of the Church.
We ARE the Church! We can no more "come out" of the Church than we can come out of our own skin. When someone espousing this need to "come out" is asked about this the aforementioned problem of ambiguity instantly appears because such a person does not mean the Christian needs to leave or come out of the body of Christ. They mean the Christian must leave the institution, or the religiosity, or at least those congregations where they might have some problem (like a pastor who watches his wife have sex with others, or the organization is accumulating huge amounts of material wealth and not practicing the religion God honors, or the institution is gathering incredible political influence based on ideology, not scripture). None of
that is the Church.
They perverted the word.
Then they taught others to abuse the perverted term.
They are the false teachers about which they warned everybody!
It's very easy to do if you do not believe Jesus is
NOW enthroned
and ruling over the earth.
These problems are fairly easy to address with simple changes in our language. I use the word "
congregation" when I mean a local body of believers. That is how we should understand the epistles, letter written to the
congregations in a given locale - all of whom were members of the one, much larger entity known back then as the ecclesia, the Church. When we use the word "
Church" we should mean the ecclesia, the body of Christ (in all its simultaneously existing majesty
and imperfection). That's how I use the word, and I capitalize to distinguish it from the rare occasion when I use the word church or churches. The words "
institution" or "
denomination," etc. easily cover all the other conditions in which we intend to talk about various aspects of Christians acting in groups and/or the organizational consequences thereof.
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