BLOG 8/10/16. WHERE DOES ONE LEARN HOW TO LIVE AS A CHILD OF THE LIGHT?
The other evening, by chance, a gentleman, who is a very influential official in local government, learning that I was a retired pastor came over and introduced himself to me and seemed eager to tell me that he was the son of a pastor and that he and his wife aspired to become pastors and to plant a church. I was polite and affirmed my appreciation for his role in the local governmental scene—but in my mind thought what a subversion of the Christian doctrine of vocation it was that becoming clergy trumped being God’s child of light in such a position of civic influence.
We really need to reconceive the church’s leadership. In New Testament documents there is no such category as clergy. There are elders/overseers who are defined as those in whom there is a mature understanding of scriptures, but who are essentially the living-breathing practitioners of those New Testament teachings. It is to these that the folk in the church are to look for leadership and to whom they are to subject themselves.
Yet, it ultimately comes back to a basic principle: We are called to “… walk as children of the light” (Ephesians 5:8). So, comes the question: Where does one learn how to walk as a child of the light? One can participate in endless Bible studies, and still be clueless as to how to walk as a child of the light in the often grim and realistic vicissitudes of daily life in this present scene, (which that same scripture passage describes as the darkness). Our calling to walk as children of light is a call to walk as redemptive, reconciling demonstrations of God’s intent to incarnate His New Creation right in the midst of the “stink and stuff” of our daily scene. Where does one look? or to whom does one look to learn the disciplines and the realities of being children of light in all of the ambiguous and complex relationships?
My conversation with this local official uncovers this quest. Here he is, in a most influential position in a county with a very speckled political history. To have a child of the light in that position (to my mind) is vastly more strategic than being called “reverend” and even planting a church (of course … he could do both, and that may be what he has in mind). One learns how to walk as a child of the light by having models. Paul told the Philippian Christians: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:9). Or: “Be imitators of me even as I also am of Christ” (I Corinthians 11:1). Got it? God’s people need models of his New Humanity in all of the realities of daily life—and it is possible that ‘clergy’ totally subvert that by forming their people to only be comfortable in the church’s in-house activities. This is such a tragedy.
At one point in my life I became acquainted with a gentleman who was vice-president for marketing of a major steel company in its heyday. His lament was that because of who he was, his church wanted him on every official board and position of church leadership … but he lamented (with some anger, he being a highly motivated and red-headed person): “In all of those years, no one ever asked me what I did during the week? I had to assume they didn’t give a damn.” Wow! His passion was to be an excellent executive and a Christian influence on the whole global sales-force over which he presided. (cf. Thank God It’s Monday, by William Diehl.)
God’s people in the “Monday morning world” of realities, however humble or influential, learn to walk as children of light from those mature practitioners who live out the teachings of Christ in the ‘warp and woof’ of this dominion of darkness. And such are seldom those who are clergy, alas! And unless the teachings of Christ get out of the Bible study group and into the Monday morning world, they avail nothing. What is your response?
