government

The Myth of the Apolitical Church

John Barry — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:55:41 -0800

The church is anything but apolitical. We can act like it is all we want; that won’t change the facts.

Most church systems are as complicated as our local government. We have elders, deacons, pastors, board members, committees, sub-committees, small groups, discipleship groups, and youth groups—and that’s not the end of the list. We’re not sure who is in charge of what, or whom we should direct our questions to—outside of the senior pastor, of course. So the senior pastor remains distracted. The staff remains unfocused. And most people aren’t sure what those men called elders actually do outside of meet behind closed doors.

Order is good. Government is good; bureaucracy is not. Confusion will destroy us. I suggest a change.

We need to reinitiate Paul’s model for running the church. I think we can do so within the parameters that our government has set up for us. We can meet legal requirements and Paul’s requirements at the same time.

I serve as the board president of a church plant here in Bellingham. And we’ve been subtly experimenting with this idea—more by the leading of the Spirit than intentionality. That’s exactly the way I think church business should be done. We should be intentional about letting the Spirit do His job. Acting according to the Spirit’s plans should be our goal. Business is something we do out of necessity; the Spirit’s work is something we do because we are called to it.

Paul says: “Now you [all] are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kind of tongues” (1 Cor 12:27–31 ESV).

In the church, God has appointed a hierarchy of offices:

1. Apostles—our pastors, who should focus on the vision of the church and projecting that vision

2. Prophets—our board presidents, who are guardians and advisors

3. Teachers—our experts in discipleship and curriculum

4. Miracle workers (1 Cor 12:10)—our people who show that God still reigns

Our church leadership teams should have people called to each of these offices on them. These people should be free to lead.

This does not mean that one calling means more to God than another; it just means that there is a hierarchy in the church that is meant to bring order to the chaos. This hierarchy also keeps people with certain gifts, or offices, focused on what God has called them to do, rather than the things that drain them.

Within our churches, we should also have people with the gifts of: healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Many of these people should end up on leadership teams as well. For example, the person with the gift of administrating will likely end up as your board secretary; and the person with the gift of helping may land the title of board vice president.

Spiritual gifts should extend beyond our leadership teams; spiritual offices are a bit different. In most churches, there is only one person who is called to the office of apostle, and one called to the office of prophet. That’s usually how the Spirit does business (at least according to the church history we see in the book of Acts). The office of apostle and prophet are unique in this regard.

In our churches today, it seems that we are not just lacking prophets, but also miracle workers. We have enough teachers, but many feel unwelcome or underrated. We need to make a change.

Filling our church offices is difficult, so (in some ways) it’s understandable that we have trouble filling the seats with the right people. The lack of people utilizing their spiritual gifts, though, is frightening.

Let’s kill the political atmosphere of our churches and replace it with a spiritual atmosphere. Imagine the type of work we could get done for God’s kingdom if we all focused on what we were called to do, rather than what we think we should do.

How can we change the structure of our churches? What can we do to make these changes?

Support All Charities or None

John Mark Reynolds — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:29:54 -0800

There is no taxation without discrimination. The power to govern is the power to discriminate between the just and the unjust, the good and the evil.

Ideologues forget this since they confuse their beliefs with obvious truths. Every organization ever created discriminates when it decides on its mission and what it will not do. Not everyone can join or not everyone is paid who joins. Some things are valuable and other things are vices in the organizational culture.

We must do this, but we must be as modest as possible when imposing our beliefs on those who disagree. It is not just that we might be wrong and so do an injustice in the name of our beliefs, but that any use of force is dangerous even when we are right.

This is especially true of a government in a republic. Our government is not based on anointing balm or a sacred text, but on the consent of the governed.

Government decides whose money to take and what to do with it. They take a finite amount of money and make moral decisions about where to spend it. Somebody will make that moral decision and use everybody else’s tax money to subsidize or reward approved behavior.

This is why taxes should be low and in a diverse society governments should do few tasks. Every dime the government spends reduces the choices of the individual and is a threat to the conscience of some segment of citizens.

If government must be in the business of charity, it would be wise to fund diverse approaches with competing moral assumptions. The decision to fund or not to fund is a matter of prudence and will have limits based on the moral consensus of the culture.

Competition amongst competing approaches is good for charitable activities.

Groups like Planned Parenthood currently receive taxpayer funds and use them to practice viewpoint discrimination in hiring and in their message. People with my views would not be welcome as employees unless we stayed deeply in the closet. Skepticism that even more libertine behavior will improve the culture would not be welcome and my tax money pays for this organization to undermine my moral perspective. In a free society, Planned Parenthood cannot keep asking first questions about what it should do and how it should do it.

Any educational or charitable group will make moral assumptions about the problems facing society and their best solution.

I would defund Planned Parenthood and provide no support for any private charitable organizations other than tax exemption. This includes organizations that share my views.

If we are not going to take this safer road, then we must not create a double standard for charities. Religious group must not face an undue burden in advancing their views or practicing charity.

It might have been possible to imagine in the eighteenth century that religious groups were inherently more dangerous than secular groups, but after the gulags and cultural revolutions this is no longer even barely tenable.

Any group, secular or religious, is capable of tyranny.

Sadly some bigoted or confused folk have a double standard. They are eager to give money to groups that will not hire practicing Catholics, but angry if government gives it to groups that will not hire practicing libertines. Justifications of this double standard usually depend on moral beliefs and arguments that are themselves disputed by many reasonable people.

If the government must subsidize a soup kitchen, it should care more about the soup than the beliefs of those handing out the soup. When Catholic hospitals are told they must hand out birth control or perform abortions to receive the same money that other private hospitals receive, then the liberty of the citizens and our cultural choices are limited.

Allowing charities with different moral assumptions to thrive without subjecting them to unfair discrimination allows an active check on our own moral assumptions. For example, do students who live as Planned Parenthood suggests in poor neighborhoods do better or worse than similar children who live as Pope Benedict would urge? Which group flourishes as human beings?

To be consistent, if Saint Jude’s is funded, then a secular hospital must be funded as well or at least the secular hospital cannot be excluded merely because most Americans find secularism repugnant. Political triumph in the United States is short-lived. Today’s party of power is tomorrow’s rump minority.

If the reasonable moral beliefs of a large minority or majority of the population are discarded, then government with the consent of the governed is imperiled.

Any American has great sympathy to the argument that it is hurtful when a charity will not hire someone. Many Americans now view sexual behaviors such as homosexuality as moral. Some Americans believe that the tendency to such behaviors defines (at least in part) who they are as people. Yet simultaneously many Americans think both these views are mistaken and provide reasons, secular and religious, for those opinions.

If government must fund private charities, then it would be imprudent to make either position a test for receiving taxpayer monies. If we must have a large government, then it should be as evenhanded as possible with the views of the minority and the majority.

Americans must be as evenhanded as possible in their tax policy for our own sake, but should be evenhanded if we wish to continue to be a shining “city set on a hill.”

The future of humanity will not be limited to those embracing North American or Western European ideas or secular morality. It would be prudent for the United States not to adopt tax and charitable policies that discriminate against the beliefs of most people in the growing portions of the world. If the Orthodox of Russia, the Evangelicals of Kenya, the Catholics of China, the traditional Hindus of India, and billions of other people who might dissent from currently favored moral positions for secular or religious reasons come to feel we are hostile to their views, then it will be more difficult to persuade them of other issues.

If we openly discriminate against their views with our taxes, we may not be perceived as leading the world in increasing justice, but as a moral backwater.

Reasons for hope #3: Peaceful transfer of power

Alissa Wilkinson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:00:00 -0800

Today, God willing, the highest ranking office in our government will pass peacefully from one man to another - and not just from man to man, but from political party to political party, and under circumstances that would have been unfathomable just fifty years ago.

In 2000, when the election results were decided after a wearying month-long court battle, the results thrilled some and infuriated others. Those results are still disputed. But I recall feeling very proud of my country, because although emotions were running high, there were no riots or flag-burnings, and nobody burned the Supreme Court down. A peaceful transfer of power in the midst ofheated disagreement is something that not many around the world get to experience.

Reason for hope #2: A call for volunteering

Alissa Wilkinson — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:53:07 -0800

Reason to hope #2:

In my grad school media theory class this fall, we spent a lot of time discussing the power of social networks, which are still in their infancy, and particularly the networks set in place by the Obama campaign that translated from the Internet into real action. We wondered collectively what would happen to these networks once the election was over. Would they be abandoned, since the campaign got what it wanted? Cynical, perhaps, but that's the way we've been used to being treated by political parties and people.

But then last week, I found out that the soon-to-be-president put out a call to these networks to spend today, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, in service to their local community. That seems to me to be a fine way to use these grassroots networks - especially since many people have today off from work. It's also the first time in my rememberance that a president has used his influence to ask people to serve their neighbors in a very specific way. (For those who are older than I: what other times has this happened, besides the efforts during the World Wars?)

Reasons to hope.