Ekklesiatime II

Our church experience is divided into two parts: Part One is the churches we (individually) grew up in, and Part Two is the churches in which we sojourned as adults when we were much more serious about Christ. In between was about a decade in which I drifted from God to the point of seriously questioning whether there was any such a thing as a god at all.

That all changed for me when the Holy Spirit sneaked up on me one night. Then came the time of sojourning.

In one of the churches in which we sojourned, I had a realization in prayer about the fact that we never really felt a part of those churches, although we were really quite serious about our attendance and involvement in them. It seems that there are certain species of butterfly (or moth?) which specialize in pawning their progeny off on ant colonies. Normally, anything that tries to enter an ant colony will immediately be detected an attacked. Any invader not capable of defeating the colony will be killed. These butterflies however appear chemically identical to the ants of the colony, and so are not bothered as they walk right in. (How many millions of years of dead butterflies do you think it took before one finally evolved enough to make it in alive?) The caterpillars of these butterflies are tolerated inside the colony unmolested as they eat the ants' food and grow. I realized that we were like caterpillars in an ant colony. We weren't really a part of the colony, but we were just accepted in and permitted about freely.

When I shared this with one of the church leaders it was met with an expression mixed of surprise and concern. "I don't know why you would say that you don't belong here..." he said. I didn't know what to answer him then – for one thing it seemed so painfully obvious to us – but I do know a good part of it now.

I grew up in a small Southern Baptist church. SBC churches typically operated in a congregational way. Every fourth Sunday night we had the monthly business meeting, and all church business was discussed and voted on, down to the last penny – literally. If you were saved, you had a vote, even if you were just a child. So I grew up reading the treasurer's report and voting on every single issue discussed. I paid attention to it all because my vote mattered. I felt a part of the church, and I was part.

The churches in which we sojourned after God came were mostly formed of and by Baptists who had been touched by charismatic pentecostalism. From the pentecostals they had experienced the Spirit in a way that simply was not available in a Baptist church. There's a real vibrance there that you simply can't get in a Baptist church (I'm afraid to say some Baptists like it that way). Having seen their share of misguided congregationalism (i.e., 'church splits over carpet color'), and been through the bitter fighting in the Baptist churches and in the Southern Baptist Convention in the eighties, they also easily – even gratefully – capitulated the congregational way and adopted the dictatorial form of the pentecostals. In these churches, the pastor just does whatever he decides, and no one can say, "What are you doing?" Decisions were made behind closed doors, and the "congregation" seldom knew that there was even going to be a meeting. Often there wasn't even a meeting. Supposedly, the pastor was following the leading of the Spirit, right? And the leading of the Holy Spirit isn't up for public vote. (If you want to see a radically different expression of the worth of the members of the Body of Christ, check out Henry Blackaby's study Experiencing God. Or The Bible.) So the pastor would just show up on a Sunday and announce this was this, or that is the new way, or we will do this over here.

We seldom saw it to appear in a heavy-handed or mean spirited way, but it was the prevailing atmosphere of all church business: your opinion was neither needed nor wanted.

In these churches were also many members that were straight out of pentecostal or charismatic churches. Interestingly, it never seemed to really occur to these people that it could be any other way. They had little or no interest in church business or decisions, and typically trusted that whatever the pastor did was indeed the leading of the Spirit. But in time we noticed an interesting thing; many of these people floated about from church to church with no long term anchor anywhere. Like us, they did not feel a part of these churches, and when they were exposed to a new one that so-and-so was going to they would float away again.

Because they had no say or opportunity to invest themselves in a given church, they had no real part. And no pastor's personality seemed sufficient to keep them anchored in one place for very long. These brothers and sisters were denied the opportunity to be a real part of the churches (despite the strangely continual admonishments to make yourself feel a part of the church by the cleaning of toilets).

That is the difference between a church and an ekklesia.