Recently I witnessed something troubling. Let me write a few lines to air my grievance. We’re a little denomination – our whole membership is about 30,000 – that’s less than a third of the population of an average sized county in our country. We don’t have huge churches, we don’t have member rolls filled with famous people, and we don’t have a lot of money in the bank. We plug away, growing by a soul here, shrinking by one there, as people of no renown; apparently out of step and of no influence. We struggle, barely making it, some of us, month by month. The tide of worldly opinion is dead set against our mission and message; that makes us small in the eyes of the mainstream. We have our ways distorted, our motives misunderstood and our intentions misread. Others among our sisters and brothers, eager to court the notoriety of a culture slouching toward Gomorrah, have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, opting for the esteem of a world which will never be our friend over the esteem of the Just and Merciful Triune God. We’re ridiculous, really, unyielding, stubborn, lacking flex of any kind – often our worst enemy. But we never, or at least – seldom, if ever – knowingly engage in parliamentary sophistry and casuistry to win an argument. In recent days, we have done just that. We have judged a man, blocked him from serving, and ignored his soul’s cries, by reading the warped and redacted paper-work of malignant man fearers instead of doing what we were meant to do – people-work – by listening to him and to those who know him best.
Shame on us.
Leave a Reply