With a total of 48 places of worship, Centerville holds the
record for the greatest number of churches per capita in the nation.
Originally, in 1899, only one congregation existed, simply known as “Centerville
Community Church”.
However, 1911 a dispute arose over whether or not the
offering should be taken before or after the sermon. Thus occurred the first
split, with the dissenting congregation forming “Centerville Reformed Community
Church”.
In 1915 another controversy divided the members of
Centerville Reformed Community Church, this time over the issue of placing
flowers in the sanctuary. Some approved while others objected. As a result CRCC
split and Trinity Reformed Church of Centerville was organized with 25 members.
Several more splits took place over various issues between
the years 1915 and 1929. In 1931 another clash erupted among the members of
Seventh Reformed Covenantal Church of Centerville over an issue that no one can
seem to remember, nor do any records indicate. Suffice it to say, that
approximately half the congregation walked away, and 9 people formed Third
Westminster Trinity Covenant Reformed Church of Centerville.
Since then several more divisions have occurred, the most
recent being this past weekend, when a disagreement arose amongst the members
of Second Street First Ninth Westminster Covenant Reformed Church over the
observance of the Lord’s Day. The issue in question was whether or not it was
acceptable to check one’s email on the Sabbath. Those who objected have now
formed “The Totally Reformed Covenantal Westminsterian Sabbatarian Regulative
Credo-Communionist Amillennial Presuppositional Church of Centerville”.
“I think we’ve finally got it right now,” said Paul Davis,
teaching elder at TRCWSRCCAPCC. “We now have a church with 100% doctrinal
purity.”
The story of course is fictional. Yet it is not far from the
truth. We Christians can be a fractious lot. In this country there are well
over two hundred separate denominations of Christian churches, and that does
not include the more than 35,000 non-denominational congregations scattered
across the land.[1]
Studies indicate that there are as many as 19,000 major, scarring church
conflicts in the U.S. each year—an average of 50 per day.[2]
Until recently we Episcopalians could look down our noses at other
denominations, as there had not been a split of any consequence among us since
1873. Today that is no longer the case, as the recent disaffiliation of entire
parishes and dioceses and legal costs in excess of $20 million will testify.
Sad to say, even since its earliest days there have been
conflicts in the church. Pentecost was still a recent memory when complaints
began to arise that the Greek-speaking widows were being overlooked in favor of
the Aramaic-speaking widows. In later years a major dispute erupted between
Peter and Paul over the question of circumcision. Paul described himself as
opposing Peter to his face and calling him to account in the presence of the
whole church. In fact, when you read through the letters of the New Testament,
whether from Paul or Peter or John, nearly all of them deal in one way or
another with issues that were causing controversy in the church.
The Periphery
It is almost surprising that we have to get all the way to
the fourteenth chapter of Romans before we come face to face with an issue that
was threatening to divide the church there. The controversy centered on a
couple of things. The first of them had to do with food. It is difficult to pin
down the precise nature of the dispute. I tend to agree with those who think
that it was related to the observance of kosher food laws. The Roman church was
made up of a wonderful diversity of Jewish and non-Jewish believers. No doubt
there would have been those among the Jewish believers who desired to continue
to follow the Old Testament food regulations. Because it was difficult to
guarantee that meat was truly kosher, it is quite possible that some would have
decided to abstain from eating it altogether.
The second issue had to do with the observance of particular
days. Paul was likely referring to the Sabbath and to the annual Jewish
festivals—important to believers of Jewish heritage no doubt, but of little or
no interest to many of the Gentiles.
It should have been possible for these two groups to live
and worship and serve Christ together side by side. Yet that was becoming
increasingly awkward. Tensions were mounting. Those who had no interest in the
food laws or Sabbath observance had begun to look down on those who did as weak
in the faith. And those who did observe them wrote off the others as
half-hearted Christians, slack in their obedience to the Scriptures.
The problem with the Roman church was not that there were
differences, but that those differences were leading to a critical spirit,
judgmentalism, and division—and to make matters worse, the differences had
nothing to do with concerns that were central to the Christian faith. In our
translation Paul describes them as “opinions”. The New International Version
renders the word “disputable matters”. It has to do with personal views that
are not necessarily based on fact, matters that are generally open to debate.
The differences may be real, and Paul acknowledges that. They
may be based on deeply entrenched convictions. Nevertheless, he says, even
though that may be the case, we must not allow secondary matters to blind us to
the basic truth that God has welcomed us all—and that therefore we are under a
divine obligation to welcome one another. Paul will make the same point again
in the next chapter. “Welcome one another,” he writes, “just as Christ has
welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
The issues may have changed in the intervening twenty
centuries, but we still face parallel situations in the church today. In his
book Reinventing Evangelism Don
Posterski makes the very helpful distinction between what he calls “treasures”,
“baggage” and “garbage”.[3]
In the first category he places such things as worshipful liturgy, evangelistic
fervor, social service, biblical preaching, a commitment to global mission, the
practice of prayer, and holiness in lifestyle. The baggage he defines as aspects
of church life that relate more to the external form than to the essence of
spiritual life: things like raising your hands in worship or crossing yourself,
traditional hymns or contemporary praise, dressing up on Sunday or coming as
you are. The third category, garbage, is stuff that somehow gets incorporated
into church life but actually detracts from our fulfilling Christ’s mission and
that we would be much better off without—things like religious jargon, personal
kingdom-building, begging for money, self-righteousness and exclusivism. We
continually stand in need of the wisdom to be able to distinguish among the
three, and then to treasure the treasures, be soft on the baggage, and toss out
the garbage.
The Center
What Don Posterski writes in his book is not that far from a
helpful little catch phrase that began to have currency in the church about four
hundred years ago: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all
things charity”. The challenge for the church in every era—not least in our own—is
to distinguish what are the essentials and the non-essentials. It seems to me that
this has been the problem facing the Episcopal Church and much of western
Protestantism for the past fifty years. Whether it is questions such as the
deity of Christ or his virgin birth and resurrection, or the hot-button issues
of today surrounding human sexuality, we are facing increasing division and
acrimony. How do we deal with them?
About a month ago Charlie Clauss wrote a very helpful little
on-line article entitled “Radically Centered”. He used the idea of mathematical
concept of sets and applied it to the church. Here is some of what he wrote:
A church community can be a fuzzy, bounded, or centered set. A bounded set is a set with clearly defined criteria to membership in the set. One is either “in” or “out”. A centered set eschews the language of in and out and concentrates instead on a person’s relationships with a defined center. Orientation to, and distance from, the center are what matter. A fuzzy set is just that: it has neither boundaries nor center. It is just a collection of people.[4]
Charlie goes on to commend the church as a centered set and
this is something that makes eminent sense to me. We are not in the business of
determining who is or is not a Christian. C.S. Lewis wrote about the futility
of this option sixty years ago in Mere Christianity:
There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by him that they are his in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand… And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non-Christians in the mass.[5]
The challenge that Jesus lays before us is to be a
centered set: to lift him up in such a way that people are drawn to him as
their Savior and Lord. It seems to me that this is our governing philosophy at
Messiah and we have articulated it in our vision statement: “Bringing people
together from many nations and every generation to worship Jesus Christ and
take his healing into the world.”
The Goal
All of this brings us back to what Paul writes in verses 7
to 9 of our reading this morning:
We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
There is a place for baggage in the church: those traditions
and practices that have become important to us, perhaps because they evoke
precious childhood memories, perhaps because they have helped us to avoid sin
and remain true to Jesus. Yet we cannot allow them to cloud our vision, to
become our primary focus. The key thing is to be sure that we are serving him.
It is Jesus, not traditions, who through his death and
resurrection has brought us to life. It is Jesus, not opinions, who will greet
us at the end of our journey and welcome us as his bride to the wedding supper
of the Lamb. It is Jesus who must stand as unrivaled Lord over all things in
our churches as well as in our personal lives.
I conclude with words from theologian C.E.B. Cranfield, who
writes,
[This passage from Paul] is a reminder to each member that, whether his faith leads him to adopt the practices of the strong or the practice of the weak, it can, and must be allowed to, set him free for an obedience which (according to his own particular way of faith) is firm, decisive, resolute, courageous, joyful.[6]
May that be the experience of each of us today.
[1]
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html#denom
[2]
http://www.peacemaker.net/site/c.aqKFLTOBIpH/b.1320145/k.23DE/The_High_Cost_of_Conflict_Among_Christians.htm
[3]
See pages 102-105.
[5]
Page 173
[6]
Romans,
A Shorter Commentary, 343
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