What is wrong with the church..... We believe wrongly today that the church is composed of both believers and unbelievers. It began at the second era of the church when Christianity became a state religion and two things happened. 1. Persecution stopped so the need to die for Christ moved from the bloody arena where the Christians used to be slaughtered, into the merciless deserts where the hermits and monks go to die a slow death by starvation and dehydration. 2. Also, non-Christians began to infiltrate the church, sycophants who wanted power and wealth sneaked into the hierarchy and became bishops priests and even popes. the virus had penetrated the church so the enemy was now within. the christians found it difficult to fight the enemy which now lingered in their midst. the only solution was to escape to the monastery or the mountains as recluses. From here we grew two wrong theologies. 1. One was that when we evangelized, we brought the converts to the safety and sterility of the convent. We could not bring him to the church because the church was infiltrated. We began to believe that the parable of the wheat and weeds now applied to the church. The ground spoken of in the parable actually referred to the world but now we used it to refer to the church which means that one day God would uproot the unbelievers from within the church. God could not do so now because it would kill the wheat. The church, the total hierarchy was allowed to remain intact. The monasteries remained under the Pope but outside the church, safe and uncontaminated in the convents. 2. The second wrong theology was the development of a special elite the special forces called the clergy. The clergy diminished and trivialized the laity so that now we have churches were most of the congregation are just passively being entertained and the pastor or clergy does all the work. Before, the name of the church included Laos or laity which implied that it was the whole church that was called to mission. The priesthood of all believers is now limited to the clergy. Missionaries have to have seminary degrees but OFWs drivers and domestic helpers who share the gospel in places like Tokyo or Ryadh are not considered missionaries. We need to recover this sense of church, a church which is composed of all believers. The church must connect as a community as a family and help one another and get rid of poverty inside the church. The church has to be rebuilt so that all members are missionaries. God has no super agenda to get rid of poverty in the world. He is in a contest however with Satan to see whose community is better. Gods messianic community the church is on display to show the world that it is better than Satans community. In Gods community, there are no poor among them. Gods agenda is only to get rid of poverty inside the church. Although if it succeeds it can and may overflow to the world outside. But it should start within the church. it cannot start outside the church for that would be a parody of the gospel. How could we believe that Kingdom values can work among unbelievers when it will not work among believers? How can be we love the poor unbelievers when we dont love the poor believers in our midst? We need to read the bible correctly also. When Matthew 25 says what you did to the least of the brethren (feed the hungry clothe the naked visit the prisoners) they referred to the christians, not to the unbeliever brethren as in all humanity is our brother and sister. It refers to Christian brethren. So also 1 John 3.17 if anyone has a surplus of the worlds good and finds a brother in need, means a Christian brother, not a generic brother in the world. And so on with many other verses. We have made this wrong reading of Scripture when we began to lose community and we lost community when we began to define church as composed of both believers and unbelievers.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:06:54 +0000
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