Independent Contractors For Christ (blog Post)

The Church is more than an Institution setup to fulfill the Great Commission


(This is something I want to write on as far as books go. But wrote the basic thesis down in a series of Facebook posts on a Friends message entry on the basic topic)


I was going to write a bit more. Nice to have my PC keyboard to do it. Anyway I have some writing in mind about Ecclesiology. The OP I think gets at a fundamental difference in the Ecclesiology of most Protestants (non-sacramentals especially) and those Apostolic Tradition folks. The Church quite often is seen in Utilitarian terms. Books like the Purpose Driven Church and other ones quite often depict the Church almost as "Independent Contractors for Christ". The Church basically is just an institution setup by Christ to do his work, but more or less there is nothing really sacred or supernatural about it. The Church basically is setup just to do "His work", as defined by various statements from "The Great Commission", "sermon on the Mount" and other important red letter statements. Those things essentially exist like a Corporate "Purpose Statement" for any for profit or nonprofit organization.


This understanding or model however is deficient. Because God himself most of the time is not a Utilitarian! He does things all the time that are not efficient or purely task orientated. The issue of the sacred is one area where this model is deficient, so many of models based on this format really have little appreciation for it, even dismissing it sometimes as "superstition" or "religion", "religious bondage" but the sacred exists as an important part of Judeo-Christian Spirituality.


Besides that, this model misses out on God's teaching us "the deeper lessons". God acts more like a Postmodernist than a modernist, in the classic saying "It's not about the End, it’s about the Journey". Much of what God does in the Bible is to teach us "About His ways" and his nature (“Economy” is the theological term for this). Things often are not really about the task at hand. So a Utilitarian only sees something like God's prohibition against eating pork in the OT as about "protecting them from eating something that could make them sick before the days of refrigeration". But someone with a more (true) Apostolic background would realize that God gave them that command, because he realized they would recognize the allegory in the old sense of "You are what you eat", and the pig of course in ancient and contemporary times is the incarnation of greed and gluttony and selfishness. Another example is the trip from Egypt to the Promised land. That should have only been two weeks but God went out of his way to make it last 40 years because the journey was more about unspoken objectives like establishing faith in God and teaching the people of Israel his ways than moving to the destination.


PS - After the fact, I realize that the saying "It's not about the End, it’s about the Journey". Does not apply to our Faith and the nature of the afterlife!

Economy (religion) - Wikipedia

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Pavel Mosko
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