Author: Al
Posted: 2007-08-15 15:01:40
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letters on Charity Ch2
Beloved Niki,
The formality of these things already amuses me. They say that letter writing is a lost art, and the instant that I start to type, I remember what a wretched artist I am in the first place. Had we been born fifty years ago, this would be second nature to us. Oh well, what is the point of doing something if it doesn't force you to grow?
I would be surprised if what you think is a disagreement is not, in reality, more of a semantic difference. If I am correct, you are troubled by my refusal to be swayed to membership or adoration by the many and varied programs at Calvary Chapel. Do not get me wrong, they do a lot of great stuff for the community and the world at large. My problem with them is that they are not doctrinally sound, and as such, they are amassed around their charismatic leader. Once they run out of such leaders, they will die off and the works will cease. This really mirrors the best of the secular charities. They start off great for a few decades; then after the leadership changes hands a few times, things go downhill.
I'm not sure that I understand your first question. I feel like I'm walking headlong into some sort of logic trap, but the role of charity is what it always has been, to help those who need help. If I have misunderstood you, then please correct me.
As for institutionalized church, and its role in charity, my views are a little complicated. At the outset, it is simple enough. The complications arise when you start putting together all of the implications of these few simple rules. It's kind of like the game of Go in that respect.
My inspiration is the apostolic model that the Twelve took in Acts. Stephen was the one who got to take care of bodily needs, and it was obviously one of the most difficult charges. You will remember, he was the first of the Apostles to die. Similarly, each church, at every level of organization from local church to conference should have some small part of itself devoted almost entirely to material needs. One twelfth sounds about right to me. It is obviously a hard job, and perhaps members of this brigade should be on a rotation schedule where they are absorbed back into the larger body where they can rest while fresh souls come to the aid of others.
I add that unscriptural caveat because of the simple fact that if you spend all of your time taking care of other souls, you often neglect your own. It is a sad situation that I have seen many preachers in over the short course of my life.
Our church has a model that is a bit more informal than this, but the pragmatic outcome is very close to my ideal. I wish that their focus was on more fruitful ventures. Many local churches have food pantries which are nice, but on the whole I think that a food pantry is a particularly foolhardy way to feed the hungry. I mean to say, that like all institutions, we waste a great deal of effort. The Catholic church really seems to do it right. They have more personal and specialized missions than we. All I can think of from us is UMCOR and a few focused missions to particular geographic areas. They have convents and monasteries and various charities devoted to particular problems and located in the areas where those problems exist. They too have the appropriate proportions, and are relatively doctrinally sound, but they also have a level of personal service that I feel we lack.
The truth of the matter is, that any given church, as an institution, should not be trying to do the vast majority of good works in the world. The libertarian in me screams out that any institution is particularly ill suited to doing anything correctly. It is individuals that do things right. They do them right because they do them with love. Institutions cannot love.
This brings me to a pragmatic side note in my thesis. Every Christian has two major worldly duties. We have a duty to our neighbor, and we have a duty to our calling. Neighbors are everyone who is around us at any given time. We do not seek them out, they just happen to be there wherever we are. Our calling is whatever specialized desire we have for ministry. That could be preaching, or feeding the hungry, or any number of things. The trick that is most often missed is that these are two separate responsibilities. If our calling is to feed the hungry then we cannot focus solely on the hungry and forget, despise, or ignore our affluent next door neighbor. Our neighbors needs are so rarely the things that we want or feel capable to fill. We may like the homeless because they are not pretentious, but our good deeds to them in no way releases us from our duties to the pretentious prig across the street. This is the chief sin of the Bishop's initiative against hunger that I recently wrote about.
Every local church has a responsibility to encourage and build up its members abilities to do these two things. In a sense, that means that the church is doing much more than its one twelfth responsibility to the community. But these things are out of sight from the congregation at large. There are no meetings, or committees, or reports, or anything of the like. There is only a healthy community where the needs that exist are met. Institutionalized charity has the ugly habit of meeting needs that are not there, or at best, wasting efforts on meeting a need several times over.
A spiritually healthy person knows these things, and it is the job of an institutional church to keep its members spiritually healthy. The Church Universal, or body of Christ is a different matter altogether. When things are going well, each person is loving and caring for their neighbors as themselves, and working on their pet projects to which they are called. That should not be confused with the building and bureaucracy of a particular church. I think that so many people hate organized religion because they want it to be the body of Christ. That's not what it is, and that is never what it was meant to be. Organized religion is a kind of medicine that the Body uses to keep itself healthy. Once you think of it that way, you can be much happier with it. Sure, it has a few nasty side effects, but without it we would die. We have the promise of a better medicine one day in the form of a returned Christ, but until then we make do, and prepare for that day.
Your Affectionate Husband,
Albert
P.S. You get five points if you catch that reference. |
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