A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Church I

A funny thing happened on the way to church.

We have removed the burden of leadership from most of the elders by turning them into a sort of "board of directors" that will mostly just make administrative decisions and such. We did leave one elder in place to handle the traditional duties of the elders, and – considering that he alone will now be handling the responsibilities of a whole elder team – decided to compensate him for his extra effort by now offering a small but regular salary, and giving him a special title that the "board" elders don't get to use, like "Pastor" – since he will be the only real pastor now – or "Reverend", or "Preacher" or whatever he happens to fancy: "Apostle", "Bishop", "Father", or just whatever he finds laying around unused. It won't really mean much, and it may appear to some to conflict with the Lord's teaching, but it's a different age now and it should make the "Primary Elder" feel better for all his extra effort.

Speaking of effort, particularly all the effort involved in preparing dishes to bring to the Lord's Supper, we decided to drop the supper part and just have a kind of quick sort of snack. If we strip it down to just the loaf and the cup themselves, and just have a sort of a little cracker thing for the loaf and a very small kind of shot glass for the cup, that will really cut down on the work everybody's been putting into it. We don't want to make it too trite though, so, we thought we might start having a solemn moment of introspection that will slow things up a bit and make it feel more serious. (After all, Paul did write some fairly serious sounding things about it.)  Anyway, the important thing is that we all partake of the "one loaf..and one cup"...although...well honestly...no one will actually be partaking of one loaf and one cup anymore since it will all be divided into hundreds of individual crackers and shots, but we can still talk like we are and think of it as though we are: It's the thought that counts!

Also, instead of doing it every Lord's Day as usual we'll now only have it every three months or so. That should really cut down on everybody's effort in the Lord's Supper and keep it from getting too ordinary as well.

Encouraged by the efficiency of our changes to the Lord's Supper, we also took a fresh look at Baptism. Of course we're all delighted when someone believes in the Lord and turns their life over to Him, but honestly it really is an inconvenience to drop everything and go wading around in rivers and lakes (especially since you never know what time of day or night these people are finally going to make up their mind). So we made two changes that really should go without too much explanation: from now on baptisms will be postponed until a convenient date in the future where we can do several at once, and considering that it's only a symbol anyway we'll dispense with the rivers and lakes and just sprinkle a little water over the new Christian's head. This will make much less clean-up for them, and will also be a more eco-friendly way to do it. (We are considering whether it would be more practical to "pre-baptize" people into the "church" right after birth.) We did decide though that we could bolster the new position of the Primary Elder by having him perform all baptisms now, so you needn't bother trying this one yourself any more.

One issue that has been hanging around unresolved since the apostolic age is that of meeting places. As you know, the Apostles of the Lord never did bother to lay out any real plans and just settled for meeting in peoples homes. Why ever in the world they left it in such a state no one really knows, but it's been a while since then, and it seems to us that we really should not have to just "settle" anymore. So we really expect people to curtail all this "house to house" meeting and build some nice buildings to meet in. We do realize this will reduce the intimate fellowship we have experienced in the past, but do we really want people to think that the best Jesus can do is meeting in people's homes? It's time we started building some Houses for God.

With all this economizing and sort of "spring cleaning," we also made a few changes to the ekklesia itself. For instance, although it has always been customary to have general participation in the ekklesia, where any brother can always bring any issue, teaching, prophecy, song, tongue, or what-have-you before the whole and present it for judgment, we really think this is a rather dated way to go about things, and we'd all be better off to simplify the entire process. After consideration, it occurred that the most efficient way to go about this would be to invest these things in the Primary Elder. Since he's already being paid to handle the duties of the elders and guard the flock against wrong teaching and such, he can just handle all these things at once by doing it all himself. For this reason it would be best from now on if all remained more or less silent in the ekklesia.

That being the case it seemed fitting to introduce a new name that better reflects the nature of our association. You're all aware that the name the Lord chose has very distinct connotations concerning decisions, authority, interaction, dialog, reasoning, and judgment, but now that the Primary Elder is actually handling all of these things the old name is really outdated. And lets face it, "ekklesia" is a kind of funny sounding word anyway. We thought about various words as a replacement – especially some of the other greek words the Lord might have originally used, but none of these seemed to quite fit. We strongly considered the passive and accepting sounding, "congregation," but in the end decided to modify an unrelated greek word (kuriakos, "the Lord's") to just make up our own new word: "church". It's origin is sufficiently religious sounding as to be inspirational, yet sufficiently vague so as not to carry any harsh or judgmental connotations, and anglicizing it to "church" sort of softened the term further. We do recommend the terms "congregation" and "assembly" for secondary usage, as these words also carry no real sense of the authority originally invested in the ekklesia concept. We feel confident that people will grow used to the new terms in time. Who knows? Maybe they will so completely replace "ekklesia" that Christians will forget their even was such a word.