Timothus

A person has the right to be heard and obeyed only when he or she reflects the Lord’s mind.

Organic authority finds its source in Christ’s immediate direction rather than in a static office.

Consensus is built on the experience of Christian community. It requires strong relationships able to tolerate struggling through issues together. It requires mutual love and respect to hear each other when there is disagreement. Consensus also requires a commitment to know and understand other people more than a desire to convince or railroad them. Consensus, as a way to make decisions in the church, is not easier, just better.

The elders’ training was not academic, formal, or theological. Instead, it was cultivated within the context of organic church life.

The New Testament notion of oversight is functional, not official. True spiritual authority is rooted in spiritual life and function, not title or position.

The truth is that many of us—like Israel of old—still clamor for a king to rule over us. We want a visible mediator to tell us what “God hath said”. The presence of a human mediator in a church is a cherished tradition to which many Christians are fiercely committed. But it doesn’t square with Scripture.

It is impossible to ascribe ultimate worth to God while refusing to ascribe worth to those whom God ascribes worth.

Organic church life is a wedding of glory and gore. But this is the genius of God.

The church is to be set apart (sanctified) not by possessing a special religious piety but by participating in and manifesting the perfect eternal love of God.

There’s a price to pay in responding to the Lord’s will for His church. You’ll have to reckon with being misunderstood by those who have embraced spectator Christianity. You’ll bear the marks of the cross and die a thousand deaths in the process of being built together with other believers in a close-knit community. You’ll have to endure the messiness that’s part and parcel of relational Christianity—forever abandoning the artificial neatness afforded by the organized church. You’ll no longer share the comforts of being a passive spectator. Instead, you’ll learn the self-emptying lessons of becoming a responsible, serving member of a functioning body.

The Bible doesn’t give us an abstract definition of agape love. It rather points us to its perfect expression in the person of Jesus Christ, dying for us on the cross.

Intentional or not, the “covering” doctrine strikes fear into the hearts of multitudes of Christians. It asserts that if believers take responsibility in spiritual things without the approval of an “ordained” clergyman or denomination, they will be raw meat for the Enemy.

Remember, your relationships have not been designed by God as vehicles for human happiness, but as instruments of redemption.

We have failed to understand and internalize the biblical teaching that our fundamental sin is not our evil—as though the solution for sin was to become good—but our getting life from what we believe is our knowledge of good and evil.

Advocates of the denominational system argue that denominations are a safeguard from the cults. But here’s the irony: The concept of “denominational covering” is very much like the skewed, master/slave notion of leadership that marks most modern cults.

I can’t help but wonder how Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector got along. This would be like starting a church with a leader of the KKK and a member of the Black Panther movement.

It is by our love—by our “abiding” in the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father—that the world is to know we are Christ’s disciples