I’m looking for some serious feedback and discussion from my Christian friends, especially those who are always stressing the importance of the local church, liturgy, creeds and submission to elders.
In the young, exploding 1st century gentile community of faith-
• without 2000 years of law
• without 2000 years of church history
• without benefit of creeds and councils
• widespread illiteracy
• an incomplete canon
• no personal copies of the Scriptures
• rampant heresy
overseers/elders were vitally important. You and I could not go a week without being fed from the Scripture, and neither could they. Isn’t it likely that, assembled together under the teaching of the elders, was the only exposure to the bread of life these young believers (who turned the world upside down) ever experienced? In addition, creeds and confessions were vital teaching tools to help the saints state and systemize the basics of the apostles’ teaching.
But once Christians have been trained up and begin to demonstrate maturity, are they not to be expected to leave the closer supervision of the elders, and grow to become elders themselves? Is this not true in our own families? While our children never outgrow the need for accountability, we expect them to be able to function with less supervision, and to take on more responsibilities as they mature.
Today, in all too many cases, in spite of none of the disadvantages cited above, local church assemblies are like nests no one ever leaves, never having been trained to fly; fed each week a reconstituted milk diet, like baby birds swallowing the regurgitation of their mother, with elders like hens sitting on eggs that never hatch. How many have elders/pastors they have never seen do anything outside of the walls of the church?
I’m positing the question of whether the kingdom of God expands in history merely in scope, energy, and purity? Or does it also expand in form and function? Put another way, does the church extend the kingdom by reproducing the same institutions it’s always had, albeit striving for greater strength and holiness? Or does the kingdom eventually fill the earth, supplanting traditional institutions, until they become irrelevant? If so, looking to the past becomes an increasingly useless pattern for realizing its future.
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans
