Macrorepentance

I’m using the prefixes macro and micro as they are used in economics. Microeconomics is the study of the operations of the components of an economy. It focuses on the way individuals function in an economy. Macroeconomics is the study of the overall aspects and workings of an economy. It focuses on aggregate income, output, and the interrelationship among diverse economic sectors.

It is possible that individuals participating in an economy on the micro level may all be hard working and responsible but if the people who run their economy at the macro level lack wisdom and behave, well, foolishly the economy may tank no matter how individuals behave.

Micro-repentance is what takes place when an individual changes the way he or she thinks and acts. Macro-repentance is spiritual change on the level of communities: of congregations, of denominations or even on the level of the entirety of a religion.

I believe that, in the CGGC, we have good people functioning as best they can on the micro level and that we have many very serious problems at the macro level.

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The CGGC needs to macrorepent.

Lately, I’ve been doing an informal survey among the people in my region (the Eastern Region) who are in a position to know. The survey is based on one observation and one question. This is the survey. Feel free to offer your own opinion:

In our region, we have the goal of planting 20 new churches by the year 2020. If we succeed and there are 20 new churches operating in the Conference in ten years, how many churches will we have closed by then?

I’ve asked that question of three people so far. Two of them are members of our Commission on Church Renewal. The other is an extremely highly placed member of our Conference staff and each of them has given me the same answer almost to the word. They have all said, “At least that many.”

We are in trouble.

The Church of God was once a dynamic, spirit-empowered, growing movement that transformed people’s lives. Now, even if we achieve the most aggressive church planting program we have ever undertaken, this next decade will see the death of more churches than are born.

How does that make you feel? (Those of you who know me well can probably guess which emotion word describes me--churchified language, please.)

On the other hand, I recently attended a Pastor’s Prayer Breakfast sponsored by the Eastern Regional Conference and had a great time. Ten men and one woman in ministry in my district of the Region came together to pray with and for each other on a day in which there was a forecast of 6 to 12 inches of snow.

The Lord is good.

The Word says that He will give His church apostles, prophets, evangelists and shepherds and teachers “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the son of God and become mature attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:11 and 13) And, He’s doing just that. In the CGGC we have many amazing people whose lives bear the fruit of being gifted for and called to leadership roles.

Yet, we are declining, closing churches more quickly than we can plant them.

Why?

It’s not that our Lord no longer gifts us with men and women empowered by the Spirit to lead His Body with zeal and sacrifice. Nor is it that our leaders at the denominational, regional or congregational levels are bad people. Most of them are good people who passionately love the Lord.

Our problem is that we have a flawed macrostructure that quenches the Spirit.

What follows is the beginning of a list of acts of repentance I am convinced that we need to undertake on the macro level. They are all monumental. We have very little time to make the decision to change and only a little more time to begin to achieve repentance. If we don’t, I believe we will implode under the weight of our own tradition-bound folly.

1. We need to repent of the conviction that followers of Jesus are known primarily by what they believe.

We are taking an itsy bitsy baby step in this direction but what we’re doing is far too little.

Some in the CGGC are meeting to revise We Believe and there is talk that, at some future time, we will produce a document describing the practices of the CGGC. This is an inadequate baby step.

Think about how Jesus wraps up the Sermon on the Mount. “Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who…” What? “…believes all the right things?” No. “…but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” “Does.”

Think about what comes next. “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”

Think about that sheep and goats parable in Matthew 25. What’s the standard the king uses to separate the sheep from the goats? What people did—for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the prisoner.

Think about that last parable of Jesus in John 15. “I am the true vine and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that…” What? "believes the wrong things?" No. “…bears no fruit.” What’s the punch line? “Without me you can do nothing.”

In my opinion, the Emerging Church was a flash in the pan. However, there is one emphasis of that movment that will continue to resonate, i. e., its emphasis on orthopraxy—right action—on a level at least equal to its emphasis on orthodoxy—right belief.

Currently, the CGGC is in a process, that will continue at least into 2013, of going over with a fine tooth comb each and every microdoctrine in our belief system and, gang, it’s not that the New Testament doesn’t care about what we believe. It’s that what it cares much more is that we produce fruit in keeping with repentance.

Certainly, it is by grace that we have been saved though faith. (Ephesians 2:8) But, if we have a faith that saves us, that faith produces fruit. (Ephesians 2:10) It is by that fruit that our lives will be judged for all eternity.

We need to achieve a tectonic shift in what we think is important. On the day when Jesus looks to the sheep at His right hand, He’s not going to say, “You got the micro details of sanctification right,” "You figured out whether or not to credential women," or “Good for you. You figured out that Feet Washing is a symbol of the incarnation.”

No. He will praise the sheep for the fruit their faith produced.

We need to change the way we think about salvation. We need to be working on We Do. We can get to We Believe 2.0 later. Much later.

2. We need to repent of our recent thinking that defines the default leadership role in the church as that of the nurturer/shepherd/pastor.

The Word is clear that the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” (Ephesians 2:20) Sadly, while the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, the CGGC is built on the foundation of the pastor.

Friends, there is not even a word for pastor in the Greek New Testament. No New Testament figure is called pastor. No New Testament individual is described as functioning in the role of pastor.

The only place the word ‘pastor’ appears in most English translations of the Bible is in Ephesians 4:11 to translate the ordinary Greek word for shepherd. The notion that a local assembly of followers of Jesus would be led by someone in the position of pastor is nowhere to be found in the Word. Yet, it is to be found in nearly every CGGC congregation. And many CGGC congregations are suffering because of it.

The notion that congregations are led by pastors is a surprisingly recent one for the Church of God. John Winebrenner never called himself pastor. As far as I know, he never referred to anyone is congregational leadership as a pastor.

Jesus didn’t call and disciple the Twelve Pastors. He devoted three years to the call and training of Apostles. Ephesians 4:13 makes it clear that He is still gifting the church with apostles.

Since the CGGC began to think that the default leadership position in the church is the congregational pastor we have suffered greatly. Attendance declines. Churches die at an exponentially increasing rate. Our church culture changes so that more and more of our people think of themselves merely as consumers of religious products and services provided by pastors and not as disciples of Jesus.

To have a pastor dominated leadership culture defies the teaching of the Word. It quenches the Spirit. It replaces the leadership paradigm Jesus initiated with one that is a human creation.

We need to repent of it. We don’t have much time to think about it.


Now, gang, we need to achieve microrepentance on a level much broader than suggested by these two points of change. But, my posts are sometimes described as being too lengthy for a blog. So, I’ll stop here.

For now.

More is on the way.