LEADERLESS CHURCHES

What is the most effective way to ensure the church follows your personal agenda?  Easy.  Do not allow any discussion about those things that matter.  Bring down the guillotine fast.  Cut off those who want to oppose your plans.  Refuse any input from those who see things differently.  Those who support the minister’s materialistic plans as providing ‘good leadership’ have missed something inportant somewhere.

But, really, who is calling the shots in such churches?  Unless I am totally mistaken, it is the young people in the churches who are setting the entire church agenda.  They have to be catered for at all costs.  Their changing needs must be accommodated and met at all costs. 

And that brings me to another point.  When young people, people who may or may not be Christians, even though they are church members, write the agenda for the entire congregation, that church is in very serious trouble.  First, they do not have the spiritual knowledge or maturity, not just to take but to be given that role.  Their experience is still being formed (which is true for all of us, though older Christian people have loads of life experience as well as Christian experience).  They are still being educated, will go off to university, some will not return to their home area again, and when they start earning, they will link themselves to their local church and contribute to that.  The home church that they helped to plunge into enormous debt will receive nothing of their financial contributions. 

People in Northern Ireland are crying out for what they call ‘common sense politics.’  In the church scene, some mature church people are asking for the same but are not finding it.  Hair-brain ideas are proposed and no one knows where the money will come from to fund such projects.  True, I believe that God Himself will provide the resources for His work; but there’s a condition, as Hudson Taylor once famously said: “God’s work done in God’s way will not lack the resources.”  The question has to be asked of many enterprises: is what is proposed doing God’s work in the way He approves?

How easy it is for ambitious ministers who (secretly) want the new build to be named after them, to let their imaginations and their desire to be named in stone run away with them.  And for what?  Worldly fame.

Can anyone honestly say that when personal ambition enters a project, that work is being done in God’s way?  When people want to make a name for themselves, like they did at Babel (Gen.11), they merely succeed in drawing down God’s displeasure upon all involved.

But some are prepared to do just that!