Devotion - Monday, September 17

The conference I attended last Mon-Wed was for church professionals from the SC Synod.  The speaker shared with us that institutions, even divinely inspired institutions, go through a predictable life pattern.

They start in a time of great exploration.  Everything is new; few things have been set in stone.  There is excitement and we are growing.

Then comes a time of codification.  During this time, we establish guiding principals, we set rules, we define how things are done.  This is time when we come into our own.  We have established ourselves and we are running like a well-oiled machine.

As time passes and the excitement and newness wears off, we shift to defending the things we had set forth in the previous period.  We start to say things, "It has always worked in the past..." and we expect that if we uphold those guiding principals it will work again in the future.  But sometimes it won't.

The speaker asked us to think about where the Church might be in such a life-cycle.

I am reading these days from the Book of Acts.  In the eleventh chapter there is another glimpse into the fluidity of the life of the early church.  Once again the issue is the admittance of those who are not Jews.  

Too often when we attempt to defend our guiding principals we speak of the decisions which were made in the Church of the sixteenth century or nineteenth century.  We fail to acknowledge that things were very unorganized and there was the thinnest veneer of agreement among those who were the first century followers of Jesus.  I am not immediately saying that none of those guiding principals are to be defended, rather that we need to defend them as an expression of God's on-going revelation to the Church.  Of course, in acknowledging them as an expression of God's on-going revelation, there needs to come the acknowledgement that God continues to reveal to us the way we are to go.  

Acts is a very comforting book.  From it we learn that even the most powerful forces in the world cannot silence the message of Jesus.  It is also a glimpse into how it was that the early Church worked out differences of thought as to how Jesus' followers were to live their lives.  From Acts we can take great comfort, as we enter what seems to be another era of exploration and discovery.