LOCAL CHURCH AUTONOMY - REALLY ???
Part 1: ONE not TWO-HUNDRED-AND-FORTY
For the fifty-years-plus that I have been involved in Christian leadership, most have involved working alongside fellow pastors, ministers and priests from different denominations. I am a “kingdom of God” sort of bloke, so I have never found myself ogling at someone else’s success, worship team, building or car park for that matter. If someone else is doing good, I think about it as good for the kingdom.
Working to see unity in the body of Christ is a challenge, no matter how firmly the words of Jesus (John 17) are etched in your heart. The underlying reasons for working together in the cause of the gospel should be as obvious to any Bible-based follower of Jesus as those who support the idea that mothers’ milk is the best for new-born babies. Yet, here we are, two thousand years later watching the number of different Christian denominations around the world cruising toward 50,000. If Paul needed to write to the church in my city, Canberra, he would need a photocopier and make more than 240 copies and then put them in more than 240 envelopes and mail them to 240 different people at 240 different addresses.
When the words of Jesus and the apostolic testimony in the New Testament are so clear on this matter, how can we wake up each morning and presume that it doesn’t matter what is happening in every other congregation in the city. What usually matters most is confined to the congregation of which I am the leader. For all the years I was involved in leadership of a network of churches in Canberra, every meeting we had and every activity we planned was predicated on the idea that it would never challenge the “sovereignty” of any individual congregation. In fact, one proposition in our Network values statement was to uphold the “autonomy” of the local congregation. It said “autonomy”, but it really meant “sovereignty.” Each pastor would come to our meetings with his or her local church agenda in their mental hip pocket (sometimes literal) and we could only ever plan things that would not challenge the agenda set by their local congregation. It didn’t matter what Jesus said about “a house divided against itself” or what he prayed in the upper room or what Paul taught in Ephesians.
Much worse than that was the bickering and fighting that went on when churches experienced splits and factional feuds. Near the end of the first of my four decades in Canberra we had seen so many of these happening around town. Not just church splits but marriage splits and moral failure and the like. God’s love for us was so strong that five of the pastors from different churches experienced a prophetic revelation in the January of the same year. What God said to all of us in different but definite ways was “the breakdown within the churches is a spiritual problem and requires a spiritual solution.” When this was discovered, the five of us used to gather for the best part of a day in a local monastery and worship, repent and pray. The outcome was a gathering of leaders like we had never seen, where a Catholic priest by the name of Father Dean Braun called us to turn our attention to the battle for the well-being of the city, rather than fighting each other. The Canberra Christian Network was formed out of that meeting and became the most effective tool for unity the city had ever seen.
As part of the CCN leadership, I used to make it my business to visit the leaders of the major denominations in the city, for example, the Catholic Archbishop. Francis Carroll was a great and godly man as well as a good friend. I can remember sitting in his study one afternoon when I asked him how he thought the prayer of Jesus in John 17 might be fulfilled. His courageous answer was, “Well, I can’t imagine it happening without the Pope being in charge, but all of us might find we have to lay down things that are familiar to us in order to see God’s plan happening rather than our own.”
What worries me is that we ever think about using the terms “autonomy” and “sovereignty” when it comes to either local churches or denominations.” Both of them assume that the congregation OR the denomination are a complete work in their own right and are designed to work within themselves to see the purposes of God fulfilled in the earth. It might also presume that the work of God doesn’t happen anywhere outside of the said congregation or denomination. The logic let alone the sincerity of such a statement is totally indefensible. That’s why no one will ever make such a statement. The sad thing is that when we operate AS IF it were so, we are no longer able to cover our tragic rebellion against the plan of God, and in doing so, surrender our opportunity to see it fulfilled. If I wrote up a doctoral dissertation on the subject, I reckon I might be able to prove that it is disunity that creates the major obstacle to seeing the great commission fulfilled.
Surely it is obvious that neither local congregations, nor denominations should claim autonomy let alone sovereignty. The degree to which we continue to fail at the only task given to us by Jesus proves my point. The fact that we have little groups of people meeting under a person’s name (eg. Lutheran) or the name of a doctrine (eg. Baptist), theology (eg. Reformed), or something else, is part of the problem. And we all know that the moment we die, every single one of them passes into eternal uselessness. We should be offering a foretaste of heaven not a temporal reminder of our failure on the earth. No wonder the divided, self-centred people in our communities don’t see anything more than a religious version of their own world when they look at the church.
Brian Medway
March 2023
Note: If you want to get a sobering sense of the call of God upon us for unity, read Francis Chan’s book: Until Unity. Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Until-Unity-Francis-Chan/dp/0830782729