[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], June 2021]
As we become more responsive to the Holy Spirit, and God changes our heart, we allow more mess to enter our lives and our churches. But how messy should we allow our churches to become?
On Sunday we were talking about being responsive to the Holy Spirit and that means that we allow some mess into our life. We lose some control but also we start to allow some mess into our church as well. I’m left with the question “how messy do we allow our churches to become?” So when we talk about our lives and our churches being messy it doesn’t sound particularly appealing because messy means chaotic, it means disorganized, it means dirty, it means grubby and therefore, unless we’re talking about hair gel, it’s not particularly a selling point for churches. You know we don’t want our churches to be defined by mess so therefore the temptation is to control our churches to the extent that we don’t allow mess to come in.
Although we may be writing on paper saying that we want our church to be messy, we want all to be welcomed, we want to be an inclusive church; in reality the way we welcome people who we deem as being messy really says far more than what we might say in words. We make them feel decidedly unwelcome. I know of many churches that said they want children and young families in their church until they’re actually in there and suddenly it doesn’t become the quiet sanctuary that it once was. So we can end up with a nice neat well-ordered church but one that doesn’t really reflect the love the heart of the God that we worship.
Now in the New Testament we have a letter called Timothy where Paul, one of the church leaders, one of the church founders, writes a letter to his young protege Timothy and gives him advice about leadership. In chapter three he talks about the qualities that Timothy should look for when appointing leaders within the church family and he comes up with a whole list of criteria: they need to be above reproach, they shouldn’t have lots of wives, they should be even-tempered, they shouldn’t be quarrelsome, they shouldn’t be violent, they should be respectful, they should be well respected within the community, they shouldn’t be a drunk, they shouldn’t be violent.
Paul comes up with a whole list of qualities that a leader should display and I was challenged to ask the question “why does Paul give this particular list of qualities to Timothy?” and the answer is, well, Paul needed to give Timothy this list because the church was full of people that were unrespectful, who were perhaps drunkards, maybe they had more than one wife or they were sexually promiscuous, they had bad reputations, they were quarrelsome. Paul says to Timothy “look, these people. It’s great you have them in your church. Church should be like this because that’s the people that Jesus wants us to reach out to, but don’t have them as leaders”.
So we need to have some sort of order. We need to have some sort of discipline and that’s often the way that we choose our leaders. We want churches to be led in a good way with good people who aren’t going to make a complete mess of things and take advantage and lead the church in the wrong direction. But having said that, we need to be really careful. We don’t use those criteria that were given for leadership as criteria for those that can belong to our churches.
There’s the old adage that says ‘if you behave and if you believe then you can belong’. Well actually, the challenge is that we should be saying “look, you belong whether or not you believe or whether or not you do behave, but we are confident that if you belong to our church family that will lead to you becoming a believer in Jesus Christ and that’s the thing that will change your behaviour, not rules and regulations that we give you”. So how messy should our churches get? Well, a lot messier than most of our churches are because if we don’t allow some a mess, some chaos, to enter into our doors then we’re not really reflecting the heart of a God who stepped down into the mess of humanity.
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[1] YouTube link: How Messy Should Church Be?
Bible references: 1 Timothy 3 v 2-7
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © the Author
