Order, Organized, Organization

I've heard people in our group say that we don't want to be an organization for as long as I can remember. It is almost a motto or mission statement of our group that we spurn man's organization and instead we submit to God's order. There is nothing wrong with the way that we mean this, but I wonder if just saying a thing that is good is enough. I want to take a closer look at our order and see if we are following God's order or not.

First of all, I'd just like to state that the differences between how we use the words order and organized are not nearly as large as we make them seem. I wonder if for some people the whole difference between order and being organized isn't just the use of an approved word. What is it we are really talking about? Maybe a good place to start is to describe what we aren't talking about.

What we don't want is to become inflexible (Luke 5:37). I'm not sure whether that scripture is often used when speaking about order, but it is certainly applicable. You can't put new wine in old bottles as the bottles will break and be useless, and the wine will be wasted. When a group draws a line in the sand and sets themselves us as an established organization, we call that a denomination. When a group reaches this point, they have become old wine bottles, not fit for use with new wine. I'm not disparaging old wine, as Luke 5:39 says that old wine is better than new wine, but the fact of the matter remains that new wine becomes old wine, and when all that you have is old wine, after you use what you have eventually what you end up with is no wine. When these groups wine has been exhausted, these groups become empty bottles that can't be used again for anything new and they are left with the memory of how things used to be or more often they ignore it and just go on to something else that is just a carnal work. This emptiness, inflexibility and being unfit for use is what we fear.

What is our ideal when it comes to order? I've heard that we need to go back to the New Testament church order. I ask myself, is this really the answer? I want to explore the New Testament church just a bit.

Even the term New Testament Church may be a bit of a misnomer. Many churches existed during the time of the "Early Church". Paul wrote letters to Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Colosse and Thessalonica. John lists the seven churches of Asia in as: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea (Rev 1:11). Acts lists the churches in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1), Antioch (Acts 13:1), Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:41) not to mention all the churches throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria (Acts 9:31).

To insist that these churches functioned as a unified front that should serve as an example for us two thousand years later may be a bit naive. I will admit that some of the people who made up these early churches were directly connected to Jesus as some of them knew Him while He was here and at the very least during the time of the New Testament almost everyone knew someone who did know Jesus. Still, this doesn't elevate that church above the church of today (John 20:29).

There were divisions in the early church just like there are today (1 Cor 1:12). There was sin in the early church (1 Cor 5:1). People in the early church lied (Acts 5:1-10). People abandoned the church for the world (2 Tim 4:10). If you look at the epistles as letters of correction, you can see that just about every one of these churches had problems. So why is it that we look back to these churches as a perfect ideal to live up to?

Could this possibly have something to do with a belief that life was better in the past? The belief that things were better in the "good old days" is a part of the human experience just like the belief that things will be better in the future. I'm not a sociologist, but I don't need to be to see the correlation that age has with these two beliefs. We start out leaning towards believing that everything will be better in the future and as we age we lean towards believing that everything was better in the past. Saying that things were better in the past or will be better in the future can be a coping mechanism for dealing with a less than stellar present. I wonder if there is a correlation to age among our people and whether they look back or look forward more often.

Seeing that our group both reveres the early church and the restored church that is to come, I ask myself if this isn't at least partially due to this completely natural tendency people have to revere the past and hope for the future. Furthermore, I wonder if we sometimes don't use this as an excuse for not having better order in the present because things will get better in the future, and we don't live in the past anymore.

If you think about this, you've probably heard this being said solely in reference to our group. Most likely you've heard references to how we had better order when Bro. So-and-so was still alive, either in local churches or across the entirety of our group. You've probably heard references to the "New Experience" at the campground in a way that makes you think that this was the high point of our group, even though this happened over sixty years ago and a vast majority of the people who experienced it are no longer with us. We revere our past, and I don't have a problem with this, just as long as we are objective. The same goes for when we look forward to the restored church. To look back fondly or look forward expectantly is well and good, as long as it doesn't take our eyes off of the present. An order that is only good either in the past or in the future is not a proper order for today, and because tomorrow becomes today it's not a proper order at all.

So we need an order for today. I'm not going to go into detail with exactly what I think our order should be today because I would get it wrong. What I will state is that Christ is the head of every man and man is the head of woman (1 Cor 11:3). Seeing that our churches are made up of men and women, it seems only logical to say that Christ must be the head of the church. We need to recognize Christ as our head and not any man. Does God use men? Yes. Does he need any specific man? No. Of course, I am not naive enough to think that Christ doesn't use people in the church, but at the same time I wouldn't want to implicate Christ in some of the things that men have done in the church either. Furthermore, do we need any specific man? No, otherwise no church would ever last beyond the span of that man, and it would have been their church, not Christ's. As a matter of fact, a church that has continuing problems dealing with the loss of a leader probably instilled to much confidence in that leader instead of instilling it in Christ.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the order that any church in our group currently has unless it is abusive, however, our order is far from perfect. We must realize this, and just like any ship on a long journey, when we discover that we are off course we need to make course corrections. We don't have a GPS or a sextant to chart our course, instead we have a book, the Bible. Our course corrections must be mandated from the Bible and not from a man (Prov 16:25). Furthermore, if we don't recognize the need to adapt and change, well then we have circled around to the beginning of this post and we are talking about old wine bottles again.

We need to take the order that we have right now and search out how we can make it better. We need to correct our course while at the same time never taking our sight off of Christ and we must never stop our journey. To remain exactly the same way that we are today is to stagnate and fester. Any organism that does not change is one that is dead. To deviate from a Christ-centered course is just a different manner of accomplishing the same thing. So in the end what we are left with is a simple choice. Progress or die.