While driving to my substitute teaching job on Monday morning, I was meditating on the verses I've been memorizing in Ephesians 1. I was thinking about how it applies to my life right now, as well as how it applies to where I have been. This thought came to mind, "how you make a living is not near important as how you live." I know this is not an original thought to me and I am sure I have heard it or read a form of it in other places, but this day it spoke deeply to me!
For most of my life I have stresses over what to do to make a living (especially now that I am unemployed), dealing with how I am going to support my family and myself. Now granted it is important that I support both my family and myself, in fact it is a biblical mandate (1 Timothy 5:8). In my case spending 25 plus years as a minister, the issue was I spent too much time making a living as a minister and not enough of my life living as a disciple of Jesus! The part of this saga that hurts the most is that I knew better, yet continued to do it!
I spent too much time trying to grow the church and not enough time growing people. There were times I did some discipleship, but by and large I focused on doing things that sought to grow the organization of the church as if I was growing a business. All of this was justified with the rationale, "that is how the system works"; always knowing in my heart that the system was broken and I was wrong! Yet I continued doing the same thing and getting the same results, moderate success and lots of frustration. It has been attributed to Albert Einstein that "doing the same thing over and over and then expecting different results is insanity"...and it was driving me crazy!
The Christian philosopher and minister, Francis Schaefer asked the question, "How then shall we live?" This is my question, and I choose to live as a disciple! Will my life be based in the core principals of discipleship and spiritual reproduction or will it be consumed with simply making a living? The difficult path is to live, for it is in living that making a living finds purpose beyond itself! To truly live will be costly (Luke 9:23). Focusing life on making a living is focused on self, to live is focused on Christ (Ephesians 1:112-12)! Paul says in Romans 12:2, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind....". The pattern of the church that focuses on marketing, growing numbers and offerings (I can almost hear Martin Luther responding with his theses on indulgences here) must be rejected.
It is evident that what we are doing is not working; as we increase the numbers in churches (and buildings and budgets and staff and productions, etc.), we sink deeper and deeper away from biblical principals and personal discipleship. The church is becoming like our government, thinking it can spend its way out of a problem and the more it does not work, the more that is spent. Getting back to the simplicity of the personal responsibility of personal discipleship is, I believe, the answer.
This begins with me, and that is the scary part. It is easy to talk about personal responsibility, until I begin to apply it to my life. Each of us will have to make that decision, no matter the cost, if there is going to be change. Thus begins the journey!
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