Division

We live in a fallen world and some division between sinful and selfish people is inevitable. In fact, even in the earliest accounts of church history, arguments and all out verbal warfare can be seen. But my experience in evangelical churches over 28 years has been marred by too many instances of heart-wrenching discord and separation between people who were at one time close. Only one out of the six evangelical churches that I have been associated with has avoided some sort of major power struggle and the wreckage these battles have left in terms of broken relationships and wounded families, particularly among the young, is very hard to comprehend.

As a young man of nineteen, I witnessed a Pastor and mentor leave a church ostensibly to become a missionary, but the reality was he was under duress. During the same spring, the pastor of the church near my hometown, which was the first non-Catholic church I had ever attended, was forced out based in part on differences of opinion on end times Bible interpretation and the social drinking of an adult son of the Pastor.

A few years later the church I attended in California split over a building program. This was preceded by the less than delicate termination of employment of an associate and youth pastor.
Two years later, a church I attended was led by a pastor with just a high school education. He fell under the spell of “signs and wonders” theology. Misuse of scripture and at least one bogus healing went unchecked and uninvestigated by the leadership. At that point I was feeling bewildered. But a job change led to a relocation and I saw 12 years of peace in two different churches.

Then it happened again. Differing views of authority vs a habit of independence, much miscommunication, and some personal issues precipitated a split in another church. An attempt was made to rebuild, one that I was determined to participate in. For five years I poured myself into the task. There was the work of, “casting a new vision”, redrafting a constitution and charting a course, and a new pastor was called. His intentions were good, but it was quickly apparent that his view of the new constitution was unfavorable, and the vision statement the church had worked months to draft was unwisely discarded. Influenced by the strategies of church growth gurus, ambitious programs were undertaken and in a short time key families, mine included, were exhausted. Tensions rose and yet another pastor resigned.

After the departure of another youth pastor, something in me finally snapped. The emotional strain of trying to resolve conflicts and stay on course proved too much. It was during this time, that I started to wonder if it was even possible to maintain a healthy congregational church. I asked in one Elder meeting a simple question. In congregational churches the leadership is accountable to the congregation. “Who”, I asked, “is the congregation accountable to?” We all sat in silence. No one, amazingly, had ever really asked the question.

It is not that I believe the faith or sincerity of Free Church evangelicals is in question. Rather, I finally have come to conclude evangelicals have been victims of their own ingenuity, constantly trying to invent a better mousetrap, suspicious of the excesses and abuses of the past. The unfortunate events of the middle ages and the acrimony of the Reformation have made it impossible for evangelicals to see anything good in the historical church since the day the last bit of ink dried on the New Testament epistles up till Luther's revolt against Rome.

But as a result of the independence and fear of the abuse of absolute power, a pattern of absolute autonomy has produced the opposite evil. The average evangelical pastor manages to remain in a particular church on the average about two years. The concern many of the evangelical converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy raise is the difficult to refute objection that there are now over 25,000 different evangelical denominations. Division is the rule, not the exception.

I cannot get around the fact that the first church split occurred more than a half century before Protestantism. Protests by Catholic and Orthodox apologists about Protestant disunity are taken with a grain of salt. Unity is not in our nature. Perfection is not a realistic expectation.

But there are too many painful reasons not to at least feel uncomfortable in the evangelical protestant “congregational” tradition – if one has in mind any concept of a church which “the gates of Hell will not stand” against.

For many months I sat in church with a suffocating weight crushing my spirit. Experience is a hard teacher at times. It was becoming clear to me that though absolute power might corrupt absolutely, too much autonomy could never produce stability. There has to be a better way.