BLOG 2/4/17. EXCUSE: “BUT I’M ONLY A LAYMAN!”
Somewhere in the DNA of a vast company of those who identify themselves as: followers of Jesus Christ, … is the devastating virus that renounces personal responsibility for the mission given to all of his followers—his church. These settle, rather, for continual immaturity, and dependency on ‘clergy’ so that these same folks are content to be passive in their ostensible identity with the Christian community. This is so common that it is scarcely recognized, … oh, maybe, serve on a committee, or engage in endless Bible studies, but never getting ‘kicked out of the nest’ and becoming active agents in the mission of God in their actual 24/7 ‘incarnations’. This lame excuse has come to me as a teaching-pastor all too often: “O, but I’m only a layman.”
This horrendous error needs to be surfaced, named, and intentionally renounced. Robert Coleman, a professor of missions, once wrote that if anyone cannot identify his/her life with Christ’s Great Commission, then that person’s life is irrelevant to history. The problem is not a new one. In the New Testament letter to Hebrews, the (anonymous) author laments that: “About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food …” (Hebrews 5:17 ff.).
How long does one sit in church meetings, hear endless lessons and sermons, partake of the bread and wine of the Eucharist, … and continue to be passive and non-contagious, disobedient to Christ’s mandate, and essentially illiterate—to deny responsibility for daily incarnation—in any dynamic sense, in his or her Christian faith? Face it: the engagement that your present and local social, cultural, and realistic context offers, is not met by passive church members sitting in worship services (unless those worship services energize them afresh, and equip them for their ‘Monday-morning world’) … but it is engaged when all of Christ’s followers in the midst of all of the realities (often crappy, intractable, and complex) live out their gospel in that very setting. It is in Christ’s follower’s daily incarnation that they become the glory of God, that is: salt and light. It is there that they are those on whose feet is the “readiness of the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15).
The mission of God takes place when and where the people of God live out that faith in their particular Monday morning world, … in the ‘marketplace’ of daily realities. It is for this reason that we need to be equipping and provoking each other, and growing into maturity. It means that whenever you hear a teaching/sermon, you need to be translating it into that which equips you to understand your calling, and how you exegete your daily culture, how you communicate New Creation to your peers, … and even how you establish new church communities (since a church that is static become stagnant and non-fruit-bearing).
The other side of this growth process is that those who are teaching-pastors of your community need the practical feedback from you as you candidly articulate your misunderstandings, or feed to them the existential realities, and challenges, of your life—else how will they know how to assist you into fruitful maturity. But to escape into the lame excuse that you are ‘only a layman’ and therefore bear no responsibility for the work of the gospel is a statement of basic misunderstanding of Christ’s calling—probably even a heresy!
Yes, and this leads to another often misunderstood reality in the Christian community: those who are the elders and overseers, the teachers and equippers of others, … must also be the tried and true practitioners of that which they are teaching. They are to be the models and mentors because they have faithfully, and with mature understanding, lived out their calling to be fruitful agents of God’s New Humanity. There needs to be that continual dynamic interaction between teachers and God’s people, where both hold the other accountable. That’s challenging, but it certainly creates growth and fruitfulness in the realities our calling to mature discipleship.
