A Case of Identity Theft, Part One

   As most of you are aware, and I hope not by personal experience, the crime of Identity Theft is a burgeoning problem for American households.  As grievous as it must be to have your "personal identity" stolen by some greedy and unscrupulous other, unknown identity, it seems to me that the church is a victim of the same crime, and many of us do not even realize what has happened.

   I am convinced that if church fathers 100 years from now are able to look back at our generation of worshippers with a clear perspective, they will understand that we were as much in need of reformation as was the church of Luther's Day.

   One of the great plagues of wrong thinking is generated by our willingness to so readily adopt a model for the church that originates in the world of enterprise and business.  It was Richard Halverson, past chaplain of the U. S. Senate, who I heard say, "Christianity began in Palestine as a religion.  It moved to Greece and became an idea.  It moved to Rome and became an institution.  It came to America and became an enterprise."

   There is no Biblical warrant to categorize the church as a business, although huge numbers of people, both religious and secular, frame the work of the church in those terms.  On the other hand, that sort of thinking is not new to our age.  Remember Tetzel, Luther's antagonist, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs?"  The more the coins collected from the deceived masses, the faster the mega-church in Rome could be completed.

   Paul made an ominous declaration about the "majority?" of preachers in his day, "We are not like most who peddle the Word of God..." (2 Cor. 2:17).  He noted that many who were engaged in religious leadership were insincere hucksters whose hidden motivation was dishonest gain.  His inspired observation contained the idea of the street merchant who sold milk, but it wasn't "all" milk; it had been diluted with some hidden percentage of water in the mixture.  Who would know?  It is just part of the model for entrepreneurial success.

   The identity of the church has been stolen when its members and outside observers look at it as a business which traffics in souls, and its success is measured in terms of numbers in the budget or the square footage of its premises.  Worshippers become consumers.  The Gospel is a product to be marketed and sold.  Church expansion becomes corporate franchising.  There is no Scriptural basis for this model.

   But it doesn't help the church to recover the identity that has been stolen if we only see what we should NOT be.  You cannot reject an unbiblical model without needing to replace it with a pattern that is faithful to the church's true identity.  What is the nature of our true distinctiveness?

   The first answer that comes to mind is that the church is a family, the household of God.  Its members relate to one another as spiritual brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers and children.  We have been adopted, graciously brought into the divine family, and have the inestimable privilege, unlike the rest of the world, to pray, "Our Father, who art in heaven."  We are being trained, Paul instructed Timothy, "so that we might know how we ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15).

   I want to introduce a second model, however, that is not so common to our thinking.  It is the church as a military unit.  The analogies of the Christian as a "warrior" are abundant in the Scriptures, from David fighting Goliath to the spiritual armor of the disciple in Ephesians 6.  God Himself is called a "Man of War" Who fights for and successfully defends His people.  More than a thousand times in the Bible He identifies Himself as the "LORD of Hosts," the commander of the armies of heaven - no insecure muddling of identity from His point of view.

   Church fathers through the ages have likened the church to the Ark in Noah's day, a refuge of safety from the destructive elements of God's threatened and inevitable judgment.  It is a good picture.  "The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run into it and are safe" (Prov. 18:10).

   The church as a "ship."  How unique!  Who practically thinks that way?  Well, I find it helpful in a number of ways.  First of all, ships in the Navy come in a variety of shapes and sizes because they are built for unique missions.  Some are troop transports, or hospital vessels, or supply ships.  Some are designed for amphibious landings; some for shore bombardment.  Some are constructed to hunt underwater threats, and others are the hunted, submarines that operate in the stealth of deep darkness, carrying enough ordinance to deter a world-wide holocaust. 

   The most awe-inspiring of current naval vessels is the huge behemoth of the seas, the aircraft carrier, with its multi-thousand crew, and which releases tremendous firepower from its airborne platforms.  American seapower is largely concentrated in the Carrier Task Force.  This world-wide projection of nautical might is configured by the combination of multiple ships which surround the Carrier and advances to an area of operations, each ship carrying out its individual mission in support of the general mission of the whole.

   Obviously churches come in a like manner of unique configurations.  Each congregation, like the people who comprise that corporate assembly, has a developed personality, composition, and location in society and culture.  Most see the need to be connected to a larger denomination, and in our case, a presbytery.  It is important to understand, however, that the congregation is a military outpost commissioned by the LORD of Hosts, stationed in enemy territory, and tasked to do violence against the kingdom of darkness.  

   "Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.  The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:3-5).

   Every ship or military unit has a "complement" or what is mandated from its headquarters as a "table of organization."  This official document designates the number of billets required to fully staff the unit as a fighting entity.  That word, the ship's "complement," closely corresponds to the Biblical vocabulary of "pleroma" – the fullness of something.  "The church is His body, the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Eph 1:23).  The elders of smaller churches need to be assured in this day of religious consumerism that all ships in the Navy are not Aircraft Carriers and that the Aircraft Carrier cannot carry out its mission alone.

   As the leadership of a church understands that God has comprised the local congregation for a specific task and that He has given a "complement" of disciples to accomplish that task, it can be free to pursue its mission in the larger task force free from the business pressures of making a profit by expanding its marketing or consumer base.  The commander of a Naval Destroyer is not continually opining that he does not have a complement of 450 sailors when his ship is designed to fight with a crew of 250.  On the other hand, he will adapt to a constant transfer of some personnel because of the movement of people to and from the ship, and the needs of the task force at large.

   In such a world of military (and I would claim Biblical) thought, there is no place for competitive infighting, ego-centered rivalry, selfish ambition, or reputational covetousness.  Those ship commanders and staffs of the American Naval Task Forces in the South Pacific during World War II were not successful in the defeat of the common Japanese enemy while bickering about who had the newest and biggest ship with which to engage the enemy.  There was too much at stake for any motive other than selfless comradery with one another as a band of brothers. "We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves.  When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise" (2 Cor. 10:12).

   It is not wise for churches to think of themselves as businesses.  It is not wise for churches of the same larger task force to be in competition with one another, when they were sovereignly designed for mutually supporting missions. It is outlandishly foolhardy to allow our identity to be stolen.  What more desperate sight is there than someone who does not know who they are?  What would render a church more tragically helpless in the fight, than to adopt a mistaken identity out of ignorance of the truth?  If you think your church should be the biggest business on the block, do you realize that you are a victim of a stolen identity?