We’ve done a couple of posts on the troubled relationship between the church body and the church corporation. The first one focused on the fact that these are two separate entities with conflicting needs. Another post addressed how to manage the two sets of needs properly.
In this post, I want to spotlight another area of conflict between the corporation and the body: vision. Inconvenient as it is for the corporation to expend its resources on the things most necessary for spiritual growth, it is even less convenient to empower the rank and file to hear and respond to God’s leading in their own lives.
They have a way of getting involved in their neighbors’ lives, their local elementary school, all kinds of things that take their time, effort, and money away from the corporation’s vision. And they make mistakes — mistakes a slick ecclesiastical professional wouldn’t make. Better they stuck to proper channels and put their effort into fulfilling the institution’s Five Year Plan.
If you’re gonna have a vision-directed institution in the manner of such churches, the very first order of business, oddly, is to kill off the vision in the congregation. Such an institution enlists its people in the vision cast by the corporate leadership, and crowds out opportunities for its people to hear God leading them, and respond to the opportunities He is giving them in their own lives. To be fair, not every church does this. But many do it half-consciously, and some churches are deliberately, ruthlessly effective at it. I’ve heard pastors bragging about it. I’ve heard conference speakers bragging about it to a roomful of pastors. (Not, happily, anyone in my city!)
But no. You can’t schedule a revival. The Holy Spirit doesn’t have a booking agent you can call. The Wind that is the Spirit of God blows where He wills. He is gloriously, thoroughly untamed. He certainly does plan…but He doesn’t do your plan.
The best churches I know find ways to notice what God is doing among their people, and support it. In small fellowships like they had in NT times, that’s easy to do — you can’t not notice what God is doing in a group that size. In bigger, corporate-model churches, that’s harder to do, but by no means impossible. The really tough problem is that it’s harder to want to do.
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