Note: This is an old version of this story. To see the "2nd edition," please visit The Cheshire Christ: Second Edition.

Whose Rod and Staff?

Okay, back to serious stuff!

"These youths were in a state of euphoria about their own wisdom, moral purity, and power to change everything. They were short on specifics about how they would reform the world, what the end product would look like, and what was to be done if the world proved intractable." (Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 26.)

Bork's condemnation of the 60s culture is not precisely on target for the situation I was in, but keep it in mind as you read.

This gang of Evangelicals I associated with tried very hard to take the whole Bible seriously. So, when they read, "Obey your leaders and submit to their authority," and, "an elder is worthy of a double honor," they tried to implement that in their fellowship.

These "elders" were very fond of Paul's comment to Timothy, "Let no one look down on your youthfulness," because back when I joined them I think the oldest "elder" wasn't yet 30, and several were in their early 20s.

But they were confident that "elder" refers to spiritual maturity, and the marks of an elder are clearly spelled out in Scripture: not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not pugnacious, not addicted to wine, not fond of sordid gain, but loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, able to exhort and rebuke. These elders were unquestionably men of character who had been tried over the course of a few years in very practical and very intense ministry situations. I don't think a seminary in the world could rival the practical training these men received. They were running on empty as far as formal training goes (more on that later), but they knew their Bibles as well or better than any pastor I've ever met, and, far more important than that, they put it into practice.

We were supposed to submit to these men, and that was an easy thing to do. All the things they required of us were things we required of ourselves, and they set the example. The fact that they lived in poverty -- I don't think any of them made more than $10,000 a year when I first joined -- took away the chief reason a man would have for mistrusting a spiritual leader.

I suppose the first test of this idea of submission came when they started talking about dating, which was strictly off limits. And with good cause, I say. Dating is a horrible custom. I can't think of a better way to ruin marriages before they start than to encourage young boys and girls to make emotional bonds without any real commitment -- rather, and this is the perverse thing about it, the emotional bonds created in the dating game are expected to break after a time. Worst still, the dating game trains people to divorce sex from long-term commitment and love. And "divorce" is the right word. Dating is the training grounds for divorce: live by your feelings, eschew long-term commitment and have some kind of sexual relationship outside of marriage. Dating builds those mental habits from an early age, and those mental habits are perfectly suited to the divorce culture.

Anyway, dating was out of bounds. Women were to be respected and treated like sisters, which was just fine with me -- most of the time. Of course some times an emotion or two would flare up, but those things were kept carefully under control. (By us, and with a good will -- not by any coercive pressure from above. We were convinced it was the right way to behave.) If, say, Joe began to have feelings for Sue, it was against the rules for Joe to go talk to Sue about it. He was supposed to talk to his elder first and get counsel.

Some people think this is repressive, but I think it makes very good sense (with one minor caveat -- it should be fathers in this role, not elders). You can't trust emotions. Emotions tell Joe to get romantic with Sue without thinking about things objectively. Would Sue really make a good wife? Would Joe really make a good husband? Is he financially and emotionally prepared to take care of a family?

This all seemed completely reasonable to me, so it wasn't the big test of the "submit to your elders" doctrine that it might have been for someone else. (I did have some trouble later with the way this was handled, but for years it was smooth sailing.) Getting advice from someone else on an issue where your judgment is certainly clouded by feelings -- well, that's just smart.

The real test of submission came later when I began to disagree with where the church was headed under the elders’ leadership. Back when the whole emphasis was on evangelism, Bible study and personal holiness, there wasn't much to disagree over. But then the church started to expand its vision and I started to learn about some of the unique doctrinal positions the elders held.

First, some of the national leaders of this small, non-denominational denomination decided to come to Washington and set up shop. The leadership had decided that scatter-shot evangelism on a hand full of campuses wasn't enough. We needed a national plan with national headquarters, which ended up being the Washington area.

These national leaders decided that New Life Christian Students wasn't a good enough name for a group with nation-wide aspirations, so they came up with a new one. We would henceforth be known as Great Commission Church.

Ugh. I hated that name with a passion. If they had to change the name, why not something remotely church-like: stick "grace" in there, or "covenant," or "faith," or "hope," or ... gee, I don't know, but Great Commission Church?

You probably realize what's coming. We were supposed to trust that God was leading through the elders. Ha ha. God has better taste than that. I was willing to concede that it was their decision to make, but I didn't for a minute think that God had anything to do with it.

Perhaps that was the first sign of the split between my idea of church leadership and theirs. But the next didn't take long. Great Commission wasn't headquartered in D.C. by mistake. The New Testament church began in Jerusalem, which was the religious center of the world, and in the Roman Empire, which was the political center of the world. The leaders said that today the center of power in the world is in Washington. I hope you catch the political connotations here. Great Commission's vision was not only spiritual, but cultural and political as well.

No, I didn't object to religion in politics. All politics is religious, and those who say otherwise are only kidding themselves. My concern centered on a relatively minor thing: the church newspaper.

One of the ministries of the national headquarters was a weekly newspaper that we, the faithful, bought in bulk and delivered on campus, in neighborhoods, and so forth. It was a modest effort in the grand scheme of things, but it got the word out. One of the vehicles for that word was an advice column by "Bishop Clark."

One of the national leaders was named Clark. That sorta almost qualified him as a "bishop," but I thought it was dishonest to call him that since most people would assume he was Catholic. So, always the stickler for such things, I approached my elder and talked with him about it. We went around and around for a couple minutes, and then the dishonesty seemed to multiply. First, it turned out that "Clark" wasn't writing the column, my elder was, and second, the letters to which he replied were fictitious.

Okay, lots of advice columnists probably make up their letters, or conflate them from several submissions, but "Bishop Clark" was now a complete lie -- he wasn't a bishop, the letters weren't real, and it wasn't even Clark.

I began to see an important difference between the way I understood respect for an elder and the way they understood it. I tended to view "submit to your elder" in the sense of getting his advice, but as time went on I began to realize that they didn't mean it that way. They reasoned that since God had given care for souls to elders, He thereby also gave elders a special insight into spiritual things so they could fulfill this mission. It was the old “spiritual authority implies spiritual gifts” idea, which would come up again later.

I had a different view. I thought that if God gave the care of souls to elders, then elders had better take special care to be sure they're right! Spiritual insight wasn't going to flow into their brains simply by virtue of the fact that they had been appointed elders. But that raised another question. Even if they were right -- even if spiritual authority implies spiritual gifts -- that assumes something. Who says they were really elders? If God gifts those in authority with spiritual insight, it stands to reason that he has standards for who those authorities are, and they would be the ones who would get his gifts.

Ah. Now I was into the really deep waters. They wanted me to believe that God grants "elders" a special grace, but that implies that an elder is really an elder, not just in the eyes of men, or as an organizational thing, but in some real way -- in God’s eyes. And the question that logically follows is this: how do I know that these guys are elders?

Church Government

Well the dawn was coming,

heard him ringing on my bell.

He said, ``My name's the teacher,

but that is what I call myself.

-- "Teacher," by Jethro Tull.

The "national leaders" of Great Commission Church considered themselves to be apostles. Before you get all excited about that, let me clarify what they meant by that. They didn't believe that they'd seen Jesus in person, or that God was going to write letters to the churches through them, or that he would heal blind beggars at their hands. Rather, they believed that the office of apostle transcended the local church. In other words, the apostle had authority over several local churches the way a bishop does in the Episcopal church: he was a pastor of pastors. (Remember “Bishop” Clark.)

The concept didn't bother me. It seemed reasonable that there should be some kind of authority uniting the churches, and I didn't have enough of a religious background to be offended by this use of "apostles." But I did think it was a big PR mistake. Why couldn't they just call them "national leaders"? (Probably for the same reason they couldn't call the church something normal. Somebody lacked a good sense of taste.)

In any event, their unstated but implicit doctrine of ordination created a bit of a quandary. None of these guys had been ordained in any church (other than GCC). The fellows who founded the whole shebang had left the churches they were raised in and gone on a whirlwind bus tour of the Midwest during which they started small churches in several college towns. These converts formed the first churches in what was to become a national organization. Sooner or later, they decided they needed "elders," so some of them were appointed.

But by whom? Who appointed these elders? They were appointed by the churches they had founded -- that is, by their own converts and disciples. And this was the source of my difficulty, for I couldn't then, and can't now, see a single precept or example in Scripture where layman ordain elders. All spiritual authority figures, whether they're prophets, priests, apostles, elders or anything else, come in two classes: (1) they are appointed directly by God, and that appointment is confirmed with miracles, or (2) they are appointed in lawful succession by the existing church structure, and that succession can trace back to somebody in category 1. I couldn't find a single exception.

So, to the admonition, "obey your elder," I began to reply, at least in my head, "but who says that guy over there is an elder?" Their reply, which I half accepted for a time, was that the effect of their ministry was God's stamp of approval on their office. The "ordination" by men was just a recognition of what God had already done. In other words, they were really elders because God had given them the character of an elder, and the church merely recognized that fact and appointed them.

I wasn't satisfied. By that logic, anyone who has the character of an elder really is an elder. So then what’s the point of ordination? Why do other ordained men lay hands on the ordinand, as if they are conferring some gift? It seemed to me that ordination was something that was handed on.

You can see where my position led: apostolic succession. If every church leader has to be ordained by a pre-existing church leader (or by God, and confirmed by miracles), then you had to be able to trace the ministry back to the apostles. That gave me the heebie-jeebies: that idea would send me into the grasp of Rome, for goodness' sake.

I didn't like the implications of my view, but the GCC view left too much wiggle room. Mormon elders can also be men of integrity and have effective ministries (unfortunately). Does that prove that they are really elders? No. So it didn't seem that having the character of an elder automatically made you an elder. (Just a note, Scripture also doesn't support the notion that having bad character automatically defrocks a man. Eli's sons were wicked, but they were still priests. Caiaphas was wicked, but he was still high priest.)

The issue wasn't resolved, but studying it widened and deepened my discontent.

Life in the Spirit

Behold how good and pleasant it is,

For brothers to dwell together in unity.

It is like the precious oil upon the head,

Coming down upon the beard,

Even Aaron's beard,

Coming down upon the edge of his robe.

It is like the dew of Hermon,

Coming down upon the mountains of Zion;

For there the Lord commanded the blessing --

life forever.

-- Psalm 133

We’re almost through with Great Commission Church, but before we leave them -- and lest I give the impression that all of life as an Evangelical amounts to disputes with elders about this or that, avoiding the enticing eyes of the cutie in Physics class and endless witnessing -- I need to stress that I had well more than my share of simple joy back at GCC. I had the chance to live with other Christian men while I was in college, and it was indeed good and pleasant, as the Psalmist says.

Classmates in school often complained that their roommates would steal their lunch. We made lunches for each other. In the dorms, people fought over refrigerator space. We made a menu, pooled our meager resources and shared our food at common meals.

Nobody came home drunk. Nobody wanted some private time with a girl friend. Nobody fought over the telephone or the television. I don't even remember if we had a television. I doubt it, but if we did, we didn't watch it. We were schooled to think of one another above ourselves, which, paradoxically, is a hundred times more rewarding than looking out for “number one.”

Our fights were with squirt guns, or with a bucket of cold water tossed over the shower curtain. And nobody lost their temper. It was all in good fun. No. It was all in brotherly love.

There is a story that people used to say of the first-century Christians, "See how they love one another." That was certainly true of our fellowship. Bad feelings didn't fester because it was a sin to have bad feelings. If someone had wronged you, you sought him out and cleared the matter up, which is remarkably easy when everyone is ready to repent his own sins.

Anyone who believes that Christianity isn't practical, or life-changing, has never lived in a truly Christian home.

... And Even Better

He who finds a wife finds a good thing,

And obtains favor from the Lord. Prov. 18:22

Another blessing I received from my time with Great Commission is my lovely wife. I’ve heard that the best place to meet a mate is in church, and that has certainly proven true for me.

I could see how that might not have been true. If, for example, I'd married a woman who was a Baptist, and doggone it, she was going to stay a Baptist, then I'd have run into trouble over these last ten years or so. Fortunately, I married a woman who was willing to let the Lord lead, and to allow her convictions to be formed by Scripture.

Our convictions have been tested on a number of issues, but we've always been able to work things through together. I don't think I could have found a better wife anywhere in the world.

Matters of Taste?

Sixty-four in eighty-four,

The Lord wants us to pray,

Sixty-four in eighty-four,

Will come if we obey.

-- A very childish and embarrassing chorus sung at Great Commission Church.

As you might expect, Great Commission Church took the great commission quite seriously. We made plans, set goals and worked to achieve them. One of those goals was a 64 percent increase in membership by 1984. I don't remember why it was 64 percent: I suppose that took us to some magical number with lots of zeroes at the end. But it was a goal, and goals are good. If you aim at nothing, you hit it every time.

Although every male member was expected to strive eventually to be a leader, leadership training was even more self-conscious and focused at this time. Along with the planned 64 percent increase in members, GCC wanted to plant new churches in 100 cities, and that required training and sending out 200 qualified men.

For one very intense summer, men and women were brought in from all over the country to train for the blitzkrieg in the fall. (Only men could be elders, but it was necessary to have well-trained women too.) I took part in the training, but I had no intention (nor was I considered as a candidate) to be sent anywhere.

The Sunday worship services swelled as a result of the influx of trainees and, of course, whatever converts they saw in their evangelistic efforts. The worship services also started to show signs of the coming transformation. The music program, which used to consist of a couple guitars, a drum and an electric piano, became far more intense. I played trumpet and flute for the church band. (Trumpet well, flute adequately. I had picked it up to play Jethro Tull songs back in college -- before my conversion). We met once a week to practice, as did the singers.

The idea was to make the Sunday service more of an outreach time -- something that would appeal to the "unchurched." I can still remember the meeting where this concept was introduced. The throng seemed to be divided between those who, like me, felt we'd been betrayed, and those who thought it was a good idea. (Of course we hadn't been consulted on the matter. The elders made all those decisions and we supposed to trust that God was leading them.)

There is none who seeks for God

-- Romans 3:11b

When the elders started this new program, most of us assumed that we were going to meet the goals for growth the way we always had: personal evangelism and Bible study. But the leadership had other plans. They'd heard of the remarkable success of some of the mega-churches, particularly Willow Creek Church.

(As I try to remember these details, I'm not entirely positive what happened when. E.g., I'm not sure exactly when Willow Creek itself became the model, but the philosophy behind Willow Creek had been in the works for some time.)

The Willow Creek model is to make the Sunday morning worship service “seeker friendly” by eliminating any elements of traditional Sunday services that make visitors uneasy. (Not that we had a “traditional” worship style!) And so you don't make visitors sing -- at least not much, and only easy songs at that. Instead, you provide professional quality, contemporary Christian music. The service is easy to follow. There's no pressure. The messages are "relevant." The Gospel has met Madison Avenue. The Sunday service is evangelistic: it's for "seekers." The believers get their spiritual nourishment from other services -- maybe a Wednesday night Bible study or a special, ministry-oriented small group.

The New Life Christian Students model, by contrast, had been to evangelize every other day of the week and worship on Sunday. Of course we invited people to the Sunday service, but it was most definitely for worship and instruction -- primarily for the saints, and for God, not for the seekers.

From the start I had very serious misgivings about this "seeker-sensitive" stuff. As I wrote in a letter to the elders at the time, the most "relevant" message to the non-Christian is "repent." Besides, there are no "seekers": that is, if we're going to take St. Paul's word on the subject.

As the Willow Creek idea of church took over the leadership, I started to realize that I had a very basic theological dispute with Great Commission Church. They believed that men hear the Gospel and choose God. I believed that God chooses men to hear the Gospel.

But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.

-- 1 Corinthians 3:14

According to St. Paul, there are no seekers, and those who have not been regenerated by the Holy Spirit cannot understand the things of God. God must act first. He changes the heart, and He has chosen the means by which He will do that: the preaching of the Gospel. Not good music and not dramatic sketches.

So what was going on here? As near as I could tell, we were gaining nothing -- nobody was going to be converted by "relevant," "contemporary," "seeker-friendly" church services -- but we were losing the emphasis on equipping the saints. (Oh yeah. That's us, by the way. We used the word "saints" the way it's used in the Bible -- to refer to any and all Christians, not just those who have been canonized.) I suspected that this "seeker" emphasis was going to transform the Navy Seals of the Evangelical world into a bunch of entertainment-infatuated couch potatoes.

Ruminating on this whole "seeker friendly" concept solidified two theological concepts in my mind that would eventually lead me into the Presbyterian church: first, the sovereignty of God in salvation, and second the priority of the Lord's Day in worship. (I also began to wonder about where the Lord's Supper fit into worship, but that's for later.)

I voiced my concerns to the leadership of GCC, but they were convinced of the "seeker" method and didn't agree with my concerns. By this point, leaving GCC was just a matter of time, but I didn't know it yet.

In my opinion, the Sunday program amounted to a capitulation to broad but shallow Christianity. The GCC leadership maintained that Sunday worship was just a custom, not a divine mandate, and that they could (and should) reschedule things to be as effective as possible to win the lost. Since Sunday morning is the time our culture relegates to church, we were more likely to get a good crowd then, they thought. Therefore, we should have an outreach service on Sunday and a more in-depth teaching time (and the Lord's Supper, such as it was) on a weeknight. The committed members would come whenever, they figured, but the seekers would only come on Sunday morning.

That set their priorities. Sunday was the time when we could get people, so Sunday was the time for outreach. Not worship. Not instruction. Not "the apostles teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer" (Acts 2:42), which were the marching orders in the early days of GCC. Instead we had shallow, "relevant," happy-face, don't-offend-anyone-with-the-hard-teachings. Christianity Lite. For a very short time the leaders stuck with their program -- Sunday was fluff and Wednesday night was serious. But priorities are priorities, after all, and soon there was no child care on Wednesday night. Then the Wednesday night services were sporadic. Then they faded away.

They paid lip-service to the old New Life Christian Students philosophy of equipping the saints for the work of ministry, but their heart was in numerical growth, and the Willow Creek model seemed to provide the answer.

Loving God with the Mind

Even though I have a lot invested in my own opinions, I realize that opinions can be wrong. In my disagreement with GCC, the question had to be which opinion is right, so I started studying, and the more I studied, the more I began to question my long-held belief that Sunday worship was just a custom.

Roughly speaking, we viewed Sunday worship as a hold-over from the Roman Catholic Church. They forced people to worship on Sunday because ... well, that’s the way those Roman Catholics are, you know. They like to make rules and force other people to do things. The Sabbath, after all, was on Saturday, and the Sabbath didn’t apply any more in any event, so this Sunday worship business was just some weird thing those Romans did. Maybe it was a good decision back when they were trying to convert pagan Europe, but we shouldn’t feel bound by it any more.

But I started to wonder. Why did the church decide to worship on Sunday? Were there reasons for Sunday worship based in Christian theology? I got a hold of some of the writings of the early church, and some books about the history of those first few centuries, and started poking around.

My research showed that the early church began to worship on Sunday from as far back as we can tell -- well before Constantine, despite what the conspiracy theorists tell you. In fact, I discovered that the term "Lord's Day," which John uses in Revelation, meant Sunday. The fact that John didn't have to explain the meaning of the phrase to his readers meant that it was a well-established term at the time John wrote -- either late in the first century or early in the second. So I looked farther back, and, of course, found references in earlier portions of the New Testament to Sunday gatherings, Sunday collections, and so forth.

It seemed clear that Sunday worship was apostolic, but I discovered that it goes back even farther than that. Jesus rose on Sunday -- of course I already knew that, but I hadn’t considered it in this context -- and then he waited a whole week to appear again to his disciples on a Sunday. Why did he do that? Was this an hint at the priority of Sunday worship for the church?

My studies quickly convinced me out of the GCC mentality -- that Sunday worship was just some Roman Catholic custom that we Protestants had inherited and never adequately “reformed.”

Reading the early church can be a dangerous business for an Evangelical. They had very different notions about the faith back then. And so, another thing that made a big impression on me was the early church's emphasis on sacraments. GCC didn't believe in sacraments. Baptism was something you did as a public statement of your faith. It was a step of obedience, nothing more. But the early church didn't see it that way. And St. Irenaeus would have absolutely died if he'd been to one of our "breaking of bread" meetings. Basically, it was a prayer meeting where somebody eventually passed around some white bread and some juice. (Don't get me wrong, it was a very meaningful time, it just wasn't the Lord’s Supper.) Sometimes somebody said the words of institution while we were passing the bread around, but most people thought that was overdoing it a bit. And one time -- it almost makes me tremble, or laugh, to think it now -- we didn't have grape juice so we used orange juice.

So much for reverence. And that was the way of things at GCC. Everything was flippant. There was no room for the sacred. The sacramental religion of the early church had been transformed into a radically anti-sacramental exercise in thinking the right thoughts and having the right attitudes. Sincerity was the ultimate judge.

Reading C.S. Lewis took me part way out of that mentality. He reminded me that we are, after all, spirits in bodies, and that God deals with us, and we ought to deal with Him, as spirits in bodies. Lewis showed me that the holy and the sacred, as well as our response to the holy and the sacred, should have some physical component to it.

That is, after all, one of the scandalous claim of Christianity. God became a man.

Leaving

Well you can run to the end of the highway and not find what you're looking for.

No it won't make your troubles disappear.

-- "Run to the End of the Highway" by Keith Green

It was very hard to leave GCC. It had been the only church I had ever really known. I was converted (or recovered, or whatever) and had grown spiritually under its ministry. My best friends were members. Many of my hopes and dreams were tied up with that church. I had hoped to be an elder with GCC.

I had also endured a lot of reproach on its behalf, and you tend to grow in affection for things you suffer for. But the radical campus ministry I had joined had gone glamorous. It had changed, and I had changed, and we were changing in opposite directions.

The transition took a while, but one day it was obvious that the game was up. I had been witnessing door-to-door with my wife, and I realized that I could not, in good faith, invite folk to worship at GCC. People ought to go to worship on Sunday morning, not to a concert. I had tried to see it their way. Having once quit the band in protest over the Sunday morning shin-dig, I decided to join back up again and do my absolute best to be a team player and all that.

It didn't work, and I had to go. There were simply too many obstacles to effective ministry, or even participation, with Great Commission Church.