When in this world and of this world get tangled

March 25, 2010

N keeps encouraging me to come to their “house church” (it’s new and they are trying to “grow it” I suppose… and they are excited about it… ). I am still really gun-shy about “organized church” … even “organized” house churches … or ones that I can potentially heading in that direction… and that even extends to how “organized” I can see the street mission potentially becoming…

I keep wondering if “growing” into “big things” is really Your way. I think it’s awesome that more people are being “involved.” But at the same time the “rabbits” vs “elephants” – or “families” vs “organizations” – or “organisms” vs “businesses” – seem to me to be more effective in view of the church being based on relational rather than governmental foundations. Even the “kingdom of God” is a very different thing than the “kingdom of men.” And yet, how easy it is for us, as humans, to quickly – often without even realizing it – transpose the earthly kingdoms structure and principles onto what is clearly meant to be a very different, spiritual (and relational – founded in the love of God and His purposes in creating us in the first place!) “kingdom.”

And it doesn’t help that we live in a society with government structures which constantly impinges on every aspect of our lives. True, many of those “laws” are meant for our “common good,” but it seems they just proliferate more and more … and we lose more and more of our freedoms and individual choice. And certainly they threaten to (and, I strongly suspect, are designed to – more than we imagine) pull our loyalties into the state’s “agendas” and away from our personal, basic beliefs and values, and even from our ability to think, reason, and of course to have loyalties and close relationships to “another kingdom that is not of this world.”

And so we, as believers, as “the church,” often, insidiously sometimes, get drawn into thinking, supposing that we are still loyal to Christ’s kingdom, and yet, bit by bit, we’ve become more and more “of this world” as well as “in this world.”