It’s been a week since we began our third part in The Resistance series. We are focusing on how Christians and the church have been captured by dualism. Today we are looking at statements 5 & 6 from the original article. I’ll post them here again to refresh your memories before we take a machete to them.
Statement 5: The pinnacle of service to God is full time paid Christian ministry because saving souls is the most important business on this earth. Our job in this world is to seek to see people saved from hell – worrying about society is like polishing the brass on a sinking Titanic. We are heaven bound. Earth is important but doesn’t matter as much
Statement 6: For those who are laity, their most important service of God is found in personal evangelism and doing things for the local church institution. This is what the works of service spoken about by Ephesians 4:12 is talking about – welcoming visitors to the Sunday service, playing in the music team, making cups of teas and running the AV desk.
In evangelical circles, dualism has spread to such an extent that the pinnacle of service to God is seen as full time paid Christian ministry. While many pastors and church leaders would perhaps not express the concept in such a stark manner, the implication is there in much of the church’s current practice.
Take the phrase ‘full-time Christian ministry’ for instance which I have ranted about previously. This phrase implies two tiers of Christians. There are the ordinary Christians who are not in full-time Christian ministry – the breeders and tithers as Douglas Wilson puts it, and then there are the set apart, the chosen, the elite of God, who are in paid full-time Christian ministry. Now let us not for one minute denigrate the people who are referred to as in full-time Christian ministry, by which we tend to mean pastors, missionaries and para-church ministry workers. But let us get rid of this ungodly notion that there are Christians who are not in full-time ministry. Every Christian is in ministry. If we are not doing everything for the glory of God, we are sinning. Our pastors are not doing the spiritual work for us, their God-given task is to prepare us, the flock for works of service (Ephesians 4:11-12), and that is not limited to pouring cups of tea on Sunday, setting up the sound system and welcoming people to church. What a shallow and superficial notion of the good works that God has prepared for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). Of course, it includes these, but it includes everything we the laity are called to: our marriages, our vocation as father, mother, aunt, uncle grandmother of grandfather, our work to serve our family and community and our participation in the local sports club or school board. All of this can be conducted as a spiritual act of worship.
So where else do we see this dualism? Listen to the sermons and exhortations you hear at church. What is presented as spiritual Christianity? Who are the laity encouraged to celebrate and emulate? For many evangelicals, the examples of true spirituality will look like the following:-
- Alec was working a very time intensive job. He was challenged by someone at church to help out with the weekly kids programme. This clashed with his work, so he prayed about it and gave up his job and got something less demanding.
- Briana is a wife and mother of two under fives. The church offered an intensive training course over the school holidays and encouraged her to sign up. She gave up her holidays to do the course.
- Calvin is an intelligent young man who has the luxury of choosing almost any career path although he is not gifted ‘for the ministry’. He decides to become a surgeon because he can earn so much through this career. He stands up at church to explain why he went into this career. His explanation is that the value in what he is doing is that it enables him to give generously to missions overseas
- Denise is an accountant. She is invited to speak in a church service about how she is living out her faith in her work. Almost apologetic for being accountant, she becomes excited when she talks about how she and another believer at work read the Bible together once a week and they have invited a coworker to church.
Examples of this nature abound in the modern evangelical church. It’s not that they are bad per se, it’s that taken together and with nothing to balance them out, they paint a highly dualistic picture of the Christian walk of faith. Take Alec. It is commendable that he wants to input into the lives of young people. However, if he came to a different decision, that he was loving and serving his community by his time intensive work role and providing a good financial foundation for the near future possibility of a wife and many children, would he have been highlighted as a model by church leaders? What about Briana? Would rejecting the opportunity of a holiday bible training course because it would mean her children would be looked after by others and the course would take her away from her role as wife and mother be seen as a worthy decision? Or Calvin. Why does Calvin feel that the only good aspect of his role as surgeon is that he earns a lot of money. Can one not serve God and love neighbour in this role? Weren’t the first hospitals set up by Christians precisely because they saw this earthly work as holy? Finally, what about Denise? Nobody is denying that inviting a coworker to church is a wonderful thing to do. The question is, would she have been invited to talk about how her work is a way of loving neighbour and is one of the vocations God has given her.
So, is saving souls the most important business on earth. Yes and no. If by saving souls you mean snatching a burning stick from the fire and that is all, then I think this is a truncated misunderstanding of the most important business on earth – the Great Commission. Christ is building his church, not a bunch of individual Christians. We are part of Christ’s kingdom. This not only involves those sticks being snatched from the fire, but also them being built into a great community of redeemed people – a society where all the riches of all our different gifts come together to build a community or city of the redeemed. That requires not just pastors and evangelists, but mothers and fathers, builders, mechanics, engineers, teachers, nurses, accountants and yes, even lawyers. While all are called to be able to give a reason for the hope they have, not all are called to be evangelists (Ephesians 4:11). But all are called in different ways to be part of the building of God’s kingdom.
Evangelism and personal salvation is the first step in God’s kingdom work of building a people for himself. Worrying about society and trying to develop a Christian culture is not like polishing the brass on a sinking Titanic. It’s part of the process God expects us to be concerned about. So our leaders ought to be encouraging us not merely to be content with winning souls, but seeing those souls come to be discipled and taught to obey all that Christ taught. This will mean a new citizenship and the gradual building of an alternate polis – Christ’s kingdom in this world. It will mean the building of a Christian culture that will challenge and enrage the secularists and set the stage for a new and improved Christendom.