One Church or Two – How Many Do I Need?

The church I attend is quite a sophisticated church, with a lot of sophisticated people in it. They tend to be quite high achievers in worldly terms, and they’re certainly not short on self-belief.  They know what they think and believe, and it’s not negotiable.

it’s a pretty mainstream evangelical church, part of a larger denomination and broadly in line with their wider thought. It just reflects the party line really. There’s nothing wild or extreme about it (perhaps that’s part of the problem)  and I can’t argue with it, that would be like arguing with a brick wall. But I have some problems with it.

I’ve noticed with most preachers  that they really only have one sermon, which is repeated, with variations, week after week. That’s certainly the case in our church, where the standard sermon can be summed up in just two words: “Try harder!”

Week after week it’s the same message. Do more! Give more! Pray more! Volunteer more! More, more, more, as if human effort can somehow build the Kingdom of God, but it can’t.

In many ways I like the church. I attend a weekly men-only meeting which is a lot less sophisticated—relaxed bible discussion over bread, cheese, and a bottle of red wine. Other than that we don’t actually do much, but we have been reading the book of Acts lately, and that’s really been making me reflect. Acts is dynamic. It’s all about, “The Holy Spirit did this,” and “The Holy Spirit did that,” while the Apostles look on with a sort of bemused amazement at what God is doing. Spectators, almost. “Try harder” doesn’t seem to come into it all.

And it disturbs me, particularly when I look at the results of our “Try harder” philosophy . . .  modest, can I say?

So what to do?

A couple of weeks ago, I accepted an invitation to attend another Singapore church. This is a big one. It has four services every Sunday with up to 5,000 people at each.  Great music. Fantastic ambience, exciting, you can feel the presence of the Spirit. And superb preaching—not just because it comes from someone who really has a natural gift for holding an audience, but also because it preaches THE GOSPEL. You know, the real one. The one in the bible, the one that the book of Acts hammers home chapter after chapter, the one that John Wesley preached. The only one that actually works. The message that God has done it all. The price has been paid. You just have to accept, relax, and let it flow. The GOOD NEWS which is what the gospel means.

So should I move across? I’ve thought about it, a lot. But I don’t think that would work. I enjoy our Men’s Group meetings, I find it exciting that we are at least trying to relate to one another in a vaguely Christian sort of way, and if we haven’t quite got the Holy Spirit the way they did in Acts, at least we catch a scent of it.

Whereas the other one . . . well, I just don’t think I could ever be a member of that kind of church. For me it’s just too big.  Too impersonal—you could be a member for 20 years and at the end of that you’d probably never have even met the pastor face to face, much less have him know your name. That’s not a criticism, just an inevitable fact of life about churches of that size. But still I love that preaching, that lifts me up instead of dragging me down.

It’s a quandary.

Then the friend who had invited me dropped me a lifeline. “Actually” she said, “I go to two churches. One to get,  one to give. I go to a smaller local church on a Saturday, and this big one on a Sunday.“ Fairly obvious really, in a way.

And I thought, why not? What’s wrong with having two churches, anyway?  A big one to have the quality, the excellence, the resources. And another thing—to have the kind of spectacle where you could take a non-Christian visitor and see them totally bowled over. Have them thinking, “Hey, I’m not sure what’s going on here exactly, but it’s definitely SOMETHING!” 

And then a second, smaller one, without the same resources, where no visitor is likely to be bowled over by the Spirit,  but perhaps with a more human, intimate feel to it, a more reflective, thoughtful atmosphere.

That way I could get the best of all worlds. It’s worth a thought, isn’t it. One to get, one to give.

So I’m thinking about it. And asking myself, why not? Where’s actually the problem? And the biggest problem of course is . . .

My pastor would freak out!

And that really is the sum total of the problem. In my dream world, he would be saying, “Norman that’s great! I know my ministry is a bit limited in many respects. It’s just great that you show the initiative to get out and explore other resources. I wish more of our congregation would do the same. Let me know what you get there—perhaps we can all learn from it.”

In my dreams! Of course in the real world that would never happen. He’s far too insecure to react that way. In reality it would be  more . . . disloyalty . . . lack of commitment . . . church-hopping . . . and so on.  Like for most pastors the idea of having to actually compete in the marketplace for clients would be, for him, a vision of total horror.   

So there’s the problem. Or is it a problem? Actually not. Not for me anyway. It may be a problem for my pastor, but that’s his problem, not mine. It’s all a question of boundaries.

I’ve discussed the question of boundaries in Christianity fairly extensively in How to Survive in the Pharisee Church. (You  can download the PDF of that from the website for free by the way, follow this link.) It’s a crucial issue. God has his self-imposed boundaries, that He sticks to rigidly. The church is expected to stay within its boundaries, and I’m supposed to defend my own boundaries, and that way we all get on a lot better.

My pastor’s insecurity comes within his boundary. That’s his problem, not mine. He has to fix it for himself. The question of whether I want to attend one church or two comes within my boundary, not his. None of his business. He’s going to try and lay guilt on me of  course; and I’m going to respond “No, none of your business!”

So that’s where I am now.  Contemplating this new two-church path. The pressures in a small self-enclosed church community can be overwhelming. With two churches rather than one, I’m hoping that perhaps the one can act as a safety valve for the other.

Unless they’re both beating you up at the same time, in which case you’ve really got a problem!

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Uncovering Spiritual Covering

One of the highlights—if I can call it that—of the legal calendar this year in Singapore has been the drawn-out trial of the senior pastor of one to  the largest churches on the island on charges of criminal breach of trust and falsification of accounts.

The amounts of money involved are mind-boggling—in US dollar terms it’s about $19,000,000. That’s $9,500,000 initially taken from the building fund to finance his wife’s singing career, and then another $9,500,000 to pay off the first $9,500,000 to try and conceal it in the accounts. That’s called the snowball effect, by the way.

I suppose I feel slightly vindicated, since in the final chapter of my book How To Survive in the Pharisee Church I had use this particular church as an example of high pressure fund-raising tactics that I had witnessed on one of my occasional visits to the Sunday morning services there.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. The legal process will take its course and eventually a verdict will emerge. There’s no point in prejudging the outcome. I want to talk about something else that I first encountered on one of my visits to that same church, which is the concept of SPIRITUAL COVERING.

I’d never heard of spiritual covering until that visit—perhaps that’s my sheltered life!—so I had to try and work out what it meant from the context.  The context was a strategy of the pastor to discourage people from leaving his church and moving to other churches. And the meaning was, as long as you stay in MY church, you have spiritual covering; whereas if you move to another church you lose that spiritual covering. As long as you stay in my church, I as pastor ‘carry the can’ for you in the eyes of God. God will recognize your sincerity and faithfulness, and so you will not be held accountable for any spiritual error you might get into as a result of my teaching. The responsibility will be mine, whereas you are ‘covered’.

If you stay, you are covered. If you leave, you are vulnerable to God’s judgment, Satan’s attacks, whatever. So better stay. That’s Spiritual Covering, a doctrine gaining some support in certain types of churches.

I can think of a lot of objections to spiritual covering, but I’ll confine to a few:

1.    Firstly, I’ve got spiritual covering already. I’m covered by the blood of Christ. I try to get my beliefs and my practices right of course, but I know that even if I don’t, in the final analysis I’m accepted and I’m forgiven. I’ve been adopted into God’s family and that’s enough. Do I need any additional covering from the church or the pastor? No I don’t, it’s sufficient.

2.    In fact there’s a rather negative, defensive posture to this concept of spiritual covering that I find disturbing. The idea that if the pastor can somehow make me ‘safe’ I no longer need to fear the anger of God if I accidentally step out of line. I was going to say it’s a bit ‘Old Testament’ except that would be to insult the Old Testament which doesn’t really seriously put forward this kind of system. I shouldn’t be asking, How can I be safe?—I’m safe already.  Rather, How can I be most effective?

3.    In fact it’s difficult to think of anything in the bible giving a precedent for this concept of spiritual covering by another human being—as opposed to the spiritual covering that comes from the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. It’s the opposite. WE are responsible for the path we follow. And if we follow a false teaching or a false pastor we are still responsible for the path we take. The Old Testament prophets are full of it, God’s anger—not with us the sheep, but with the pastors, the false prophets who lead well-meaning and sincere people onto the path of destruction thinking it to be the path to life.

4.    The New Testament may be a bit more ambivalent when it comes to ‘stepping outside’. I don’t see that as a major doctrinal issue, rather as a practical issue in a tiny first century Christian movement with effectively only one church to choose from. Stepping out of the church meant a return to paganism, leaving God behind. Today, with a multiplicity of churches available to choose from, the situation is different. There’s no parallel.

5.    Then there’s the ultimate inconsistency in the doctrine. Spiritual covering is used by pastors to protect their own congregation from attrition at the hands of neighbouring churches. It says that if you are a part of this church, then God wants you to stay a part of this church, permanently. BUT all pastors have a past. Almost without exception they’ve come from another church somewhere along the line. And if I’m not supposed to leave their church, then how come they were justified in leaving wherever it was that they came from themselves?

6.    This is certainly true of the case in point. In many ways (leaving the money side out of it) he’s done a great job. He’s probably accomplished far more by the move than he ever would have by staying. No argument about that. But—if it’s OK for him to leave that church, surely it’s OK for ME to leave HIS church! If I feel called to leave his church and start something new, why can’t he give his blessing and say, ‘Fantastic! God go with you!’. Except that . . . his church is the RIGHT church and all the others are the WRONG church. Enough of that self-deluding nonsense!

Spiritual covering—a ‘new’ doctrine from the more authoritarian segment of the Christian church? A tool used by church leaders in authoritarian, one-man-show churches to cement their own positions and shore up their authority. But not of course something that would ever happen in a ‘respectable’ church—certainly not the rather staid Anglican church that I attend. 

Or is it?

When I think about it, others may not give it a formal name or elevate it quite to a doctrine. But the underlying mentality can still be there. Witness the highly negative reaction of my own vicar when he found out I’d been attending meetings in other churches. He COULD have said, “That’s great Norman! Get out there and get some new ideas! I’m not perfect, go an listen to others, if you learn anything bring it back and let’s hear it!” COULD have said, but didn’t. What he actually said, I leave to your imagination.

Where does all this defensiveness come from? It comes from pride, and it comes from insecurity. Pride that can’t bear to contemplate than any other church somewhere might actually be ahead of mine in hearing from God (no shame in admitting that, surely?). And insecurity which, granted, can be worse if you’re a salaried church employee dependent on the success for the church for your daily bread.  But aren’t we supposed to be moving beyond that? Isn’t that the whole point?

So why not have two churches? Perhaps we should ALL have two churches. Perhaps I’ll come to that one next . . .

What is SIN anyway?

I’ve always had trouble understanding just what this word—SIN—means. It gets used often enough in church but the definitions tend to be a bit vague. It’s like, “If you don’t know what it means then by definition you must be doing it.” Here are two questions, or examples of the sorts of quandary I have sometimes found myself in . . . 

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Is God an Algorithm?

          

“Norman, what do you think about gay marriage?”

That was Linda, from across the table over dinner at the Singapore Swiss Club under a dark warm tropical night sky.

I launched into my standard answer.

“Marriage is essentially a contract. An exclusive contract between two people in which they pledge a commitment to love and respect one another, and to refrain from sexual relations with anyone else, as long as they live. It seems to me that if two people wish to enter into a contract not to have sex with anyone else, then that’s no one’s business but their own.” 

I went on to explain . . . 

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God, Church and Collapsing Banks

God speaks to me from the most unlikely directions

I’ve been reading a book called Fool’s Gold  about the 2007-8 financial crash. It’s written by a Financial Times journalist named Gillian Tett.

Bring interested in the subject, I found it a reasonably good read, but it was only right at the end, in the  epilogue, that it really hit home to me. Here she moves from straight history to a more subjective reflection on her personal reactions, and here I found something that seems relevant not just to the way in which banks and hedge funds work, but also to the workings of institutions in general and in particular the church.

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Roots of Islam Part 4 - the Morality

finally we need to look at a contentious point—the morality of Islam, and the attitude to war and violence.

Muhammad died in 632 AD. After a series of battles with his opponents he had been able to return to Mecca (630 AD) re-establishing himself in his former home town. By this time he was well on his way also to imposing Islam on the rest of Arabia—by force mainly, not by persuasion. Further battles left him as de facto ruler of Arabia.

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Roots of Islam Part 3 - the Koran

Most reasonably informed Christians are probably aware that the Koran draws some of its ideas from the bible. Few are perhaps aware just how much of it comes from the bible. I wasn’t, until I sat down to read it. After I started reading, I was totally dumbfounded by the sheer extent of the copying!

Let’s consider one sura (chapter) only—sura 2 . . .
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