“Church” as a cultural institution, as I know it here in the U.S., is a system by which men can come under spiritual authority. The problem lies in that while many submit to the synchronization of Sundays, few participants will encounter true spiritual accountability with a spiritual family working out their faith in a close knit group of loving and nurturing relationships. For those who will not synchronize their Sundays, chances may be even more slim. The institution of family was originally established by God to cultivate love, initiate life, provide identity and affirmation to offspring, maturity, equipping, protection, and sustainability to the family for consecutive generations, and—I’m sure there is more…
In this fast-paced society, it is not natural for us to slow down long enough to carefully cultivate the lives of our brothers and sisters, nor allow spiritual fathers and mothers to carefully garden our lives. So participation in a spiritual country club of those who can stretch to pay the participation fee of the will, allows like-minded people to be seen with each other on Sundays, while by nature of crowd ministry, the lives of club members are cheapened when we will not go deeper by personally interacting with a “soul gardener” (aka. Discipler). Soul gardening requires that the Discipler have access to know and hear personal feedback and to respond to that feedback by way of conversation.
What I’m getting at is that we no longer need to place our pride in the badge of our local church membership but rather we should stir up, value and pursue Christ in each other, the hope of glory. These relationships may be introduced through our participation in a local church, but I do not see how a system of synchronization can create the value for and provide the practical time for iron to sharpen iron by nature of the time required to pursue God-purposed friendships. Rather, I think we ‘re all going to need to pursue these relationships beyond our “fellowship” in the Sunday crowd.
