A Dysfunctional Family
Church is a great picture of family…sometimes a dysfunctional one. Lisa, my wife, and I believe that our corps is our family, but sometimes I think we’re a dysfunctional family. We’ve been walking through the book of Acts and see a healthy and passionate church. If three thousand people came to know the Lord in one day in our town that would be half the town! The believers met together in worship, they ate together and even shared their possessions with each other. They functioned like a family. I was thinking about this when it hit me. Believers meet together for only a couple hours on Sunday and once in a while we meet in the week for some sort of teaching and fellowship and then wait for Sunday to roll around again. If this was our blood family we’d say, “Only a truly dysfunctional family would live like this.” Guess what. That’s us. We are a dysfunctional family. Should we be surprised there are only 35 of us meeting together? The family of God needs to meet, eat, and wash feet together. We may still look dysfunctional to others, but then again, most families suffer a little dysfunction.
Paul Trickett
1 Comments:
Paul I enjoyed reading this... you make some good observations. In the "old days" it seemed like we practically lived at the Army. People talk about that now like it was a bad thing. It wasn't... it was a very enriching life as far as I'm concerned. We justify our current dysfunction by saying that the Army was just keeping people busy in those days but that there was no spiritual depth in it. That may have been true for some people in some places. But I don't think this is generally true... I was nurtured in that environment by some pretty great people. It is true that Army young people are getting more into "worship" (whatever that is) and Bible Study (where the Bible doesn't always really get studied)... but it seems to me that this is only a sympton of our dysfunction (i.e. that we are drifting miles away from our primary purpose.) We have forgotten that we are an international mission raised up to take Christ to a dying world... we have become a lot of struggling autonomous congregations attempting to be "churches" rather than - together as a functional family - being the mission God raised us up to be. And we struggle to survive on some twisted perversion of the teaching of Bill Hybels or Rick Warren or Nicky Gumbel and seem convinced that the Army has nothing worthwhile to say for itself anymore. Dysfunctional? Oh yeah!
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