That voice in your head that keeps rehearsing the disappointments and
flaws of your church is not from the Lord. It is the accuser, helping
you get to the “I have no need of you” forbidden in 1 Corinthians 12:21.
We may have legitimate concerns about our church’s maturity, its
repentance, its effectiveness, or its “personality,” and there is
certainly a place for sharing concerns and criticisms, a biblical call
to honest appraisal, and plenty of space for exhortation and rebuke, but
many claiming to do these things have shifted to a legal measuring none
of us really has the authority for. Here is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer
says in Life Together about looking at our churches through the lens of scrutiny:
If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian
fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great
experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and
difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that
everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we
hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure
and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from
pastors and zealous members about their congregations. A pastor should
not complain about his congregations, certainly never to other people,
but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in
order that he should become its accuser before God and men. When a
person becomes alienated from a Christian community in which he has been
placed and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine
himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream
that should be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank
God for leading him into this predicament. Continue at Jared C. Wilson
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