Church Voices

This is part II in a series, the introductory piece is found here. What you’ll notice is missing from the introduction is tying together what we find in scripture with the general principles I outlined in the first section.

First, I’m not undermining the sovereignty of God or the role that God played in the formation and success of the early church, but, at the same time the wisdom and effort that Paul and other early movers and shakers put into the early church is often overlooked. Prayer is essential to the success of any church, but so is getting up off your butt, firing up the old neurons and getting to work. Understanding the way the world operates and acting in a way that will get the best possible results is the functional definition of wisdom, and that’s something that applies to secular efforts as well as to Christian ones. As a result when we see a successful movement in the secular world, there are probably underlying principles that are Biblical which the church (or a church) can imitate to find similar success.

Recently I was listening to a radio interview with a guy who compiled information about how best to avoid a ticket after being pulled over. The first thing he said is don’t deny it because the cop won’t hear denials, instead he’ll hear you calling him either a liar or an incompetent and will definitely give you a ticket. Instead admit that you were speeding and apologize.

A little bit after this interview I’m wandering through scripture and find this in Proverbs 6:3:

“ then do this, my son, to free yourself,
since you have fallen into your neighbor’s hands:
Go and humble yourself;
press your plea with your neighbor!

That is the Biblical principle behind the advice on how to get out of a ticket. And there’s others out there we can learn from.

But, why should we bother with finding secular practices with Biblical principles when we can just open up the scriptures and find the Biblical principles without having to go to the effort of finding the secular practice? Good question. The answer is found in a conversation I had with a guy that runs a bunch of computers that do nothing more than store all the data for a major bank. In other words if this facility goes down it could be really bad news. I asked him what he thought about Vista, assuming that he had given it a shot what with being in IT, and he told me they don’t even look at new software until its been out for at least six months, because they’d rather be behind in technology than start using something that hasn’t been tried out in a lot of situations by a lot of different people. In other words, they want other people to take all the risks of new software, and to pay the price for those risks, and then, later, he can avoid any problems they had, or take advantage of techniques and training that those people developed without costing them the same in time, and failure.

The Biblical principle to this is found in Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 4:14-16:

15Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. 16Therefore I urge you to imitate me.

In other words, its easier to imitate Paul than to trail blaze your own spiritual path to God.

By taking a look at what works today, and the underlying Biblical principles we can allow other groups to take all the risks. Adopting their techniques, and imitating what they did will reduce our own costs and risk of failure, and that friends, is Biblical, and part of the reason why the early church managed to survive and grow.