{"id":1291,"date":"2014-11-17T22:44:38","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T22:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/commonsensechristianity\/?p=1291"},"modified":"2014-11-17T22:44:38","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T22:44:38","slug":"must-we-obey-church-authorities-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/commonsensechristianity\/2014\/11\/must-we-obey-church-authorities-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Must We Obey Church Authorities?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obedience, subservience to authority, submission, docility, accountability — these concepts are so prominent, and so interwoven\u00a0within many Christian circles, that you’d think they were the foundation upon which Christ taught.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
Whom do we obey, and worship? It’s a question all humans must find an adequate answer to, but for the Christian, the answer is, God alone. The Priest’s Secret, drawing by Steve Henderson<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In other words, a\u00a0good Christian does what he or she is told.<\/p>\n

“Jesus was passive,” someone told me the other day, “and He taught His followers to be the same.” My speaker was expressing frustration with contemporary\u00a0Christians, and Christianity, and while I agree with his assessment that\u00a0followers are actively\u00a0taught to be passive, I disagree that it is Christ who gives them this message.<\/p>\n

Men say this, and they’ve been saying it for a long time.<\/p>\n

Agnes Grey<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a novel by Anne Bronte, the youngest of the three Bronte sisters (think Emily, and Wuthering Heights; and Charlotte, with Jane Eyre), that follows a young woman as she serves as governess to a series of horrendously atrocious children. Like her sisters, Anne made observations about the religious — Christian — environment of her day, and this passage describes her character Agnes’s\u00a0assessment of the local rector, or pastor:<\/p>\n

“His favourite subjects were church discipline, rites and ceremonies, apostolic succession, the duty of reverence and obedience to the clergy, the atrocious criminality of dissent, the absolute necessity of observing all the forms\u00a0of\u00a0godliness, the reprehensible presumption of individuals who attempted to think for themselves in matters connected with religion, or to be guided by their own interpretations of Scripture . . . supporting his maxims and exhortations throughout with quotations from the Fathers: with whom he appeared to be far better acquainted than with the Apostles and Evangelists, and whose\u00a0importance\u00a0he seemed to consider at least equal to theirs.”<\/p>\n

Contemporary Thought<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Published\u00a0in 1847, this paragraph —\u00a0so contemporaneous that it’s\u00a0astonishing\u00a0— is a sober awakening that the pressure to conform, obey, comply, acquiesce, and passively accept what we are told has been around a long time, and the message of 167\u00a0years ago is still being preached today, in Jesus’s name.<\/p>\n

A friend sent me an article about\u00a0Christine Weick<\/a>, an\u00a0outspoken, seemingly ordinary Christian,\u00a0who crashed an ecumenical-fest at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., which was sponsoring a joint Islamic call to prayer in the Protestant, Episcopalian church. According to the article,\u00a0leadership determined that sending prayers up to Allah from a Christian church would show the world that two different religions could “approach the same God” as one body of believers.<\/p>\n

Making her way through multiple levels of armed security (how interesting — civil police in a religious setting; it reminds me of Christ before Pilate), Weick stood in front long enough to make this speech:<\/p>\n

\u201cJesus Christ died on that cross. He is the reason we are to worship only Him. Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior\u00a0. . .\u00a0We have built\u00a0. . . \u00a0allowed you your mosques in this country. Why don\u2019t you worship in your mosques and leave our churches alone?”<\/p>\n

Where Is the Diversity?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It’s a good question: why are we — no, not we, but leaders in establishment churches — so adamant about blurring significant\u00a0discrepancies\u00a0in our belief systems and pretending that they don’t exist, as opposed to truly allowing us to\u00a0\u00a0“celebrate our differences”? As I mentioned to a reader recently, demanding to know whether or not I would vote to protect “homosexual rights,” \u00a0we don’t have to agree with one another to get along, and indeed, forcing one person to\u00a0acquiesce to the beliefs of another,\u00a0discounts and disparages\u00a0the conscience of the first.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
Ordinary people, preparing for the day, ready to walk out in the public arena and speak up for themselves. The New Hat, original oil painting by Steve Henderson.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most sensible — ordinary — people know enough to cheerfully agree to disagree,\u00a0focusing\u00a0upon what we do share in common, but self-appointed world religious leadership, in its push for “ecumenical unity,” chooses to ignore commonsense, with the\u00a0plausibly obvious result that the people, the masses, the sheep, the laity, the non-leadership, will be upset, resulting in less unity, not more. Leadership is not too stupid to realize this; the question is — are we too stupid to\u00a0understand\u00a0that we are being played?<\/p>\n

Weick’s civil disobedience,\u00a0lauded in the likes of Martin Luther King, is not so\u00a0honored when it comes from the mouth of an ordinary person, speaking up and out, but this is what Christians — through Christ — are commanded to do:<\/p>\n

“Teacher,”<\/em>\u00a0some Pharisees in a crowd once said to Jesus, “Rebuke your disciples!”<\/em><\/p>\n

“‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.'”<\/em>\u00a0(Luke 19:39-40)<\/p>\n

Speak Up and Out<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Whether or not Weick was correct to crash a private party (it was “invitation only” — how inclusive), she spoke up, and this is something that belief in Christ\u00a0does not forbid us to do<\/em>\u00a0— in the general public, at the church annual meeting, to the pastor directly. Indeed, the interesting thing about speaking up is that, generally, what we say is far more innocuous than the punishment received for saying it.<\/p>\n

Jesus experienced this when he responded to the high priest questioning Him about his disciples and his teaching in John 18:19-21:<\/p>\n

“‘I have spoken openly to the world,’ Jesus replied. ‘I always taught in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret. Why question me? Ask those who heard me. Surely they know what I said.”<\/em><\/p>\n

In response to this speech,\u00a0“one of the officials nearby struck him in the face. ‘Is this the way you answer the high priest?’ he demanded.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve always thought — “How ironic. You just slapped God.”<\/p>\n

But such is the arrogance of mankind, that it makes its decrees, and demands that all follow.\u00a0Men of power\u00a0are not below twisting and distorting Scripture to\u00a0their\u00a0own ends, putting\u00a0themselves\u00a0in God’s place and demanding the submission we owe to Him.\u00a0It\u00a0is up to each individual Christian to read Scripture,\u00a0knowing it well enough\u00a0to\u00a0identify\u00a0when it is being misused, and to determine whether or not a man — a pastor, a priest, a vicar, a rector, a Pope, an elder — ever has the right to say, “Obey me!”<\/p>\n

Thank You<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Thank you for joining me at Commonsense Christianity where my constant message to fellow Christians is this: Read the Bible for yourself. Pray for wisdom. Trust that God can, and does, teach His children the truth.<\/p>\n

Posts complementing this one are<\/p>\n

Questioning Convention: It’s Part of Growth<\/a><\/p>\n

What If You’re Too Timid to Be “Bold for Christ”?<\/a><\/p>\n

The Misfit Christian<\/a>\u00a0(If you speak up, this is what you will find yourself to be.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obedience, subservience to authority, submission, docility, accountability — these concepts are so prominent, and so interwoven\u00a0within many Christian circles, that you’d think they were the foundation upon which Christ taught. 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