Gang,
Below is a portion of an exchange I had recently with a CGGC friend.
I've copied portions of it here because my friend makes points consistent with the theme of this blog, points dear to my prophetic heart.
As you can see from the first paragraph, what I say is in italics. My friend's words are in bold.
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You're wrong on my take on church, at least partially. The concept was important in the Old Covenant. There was even a verb that corresponded to the noun. However, the nature of the New Covenant, laid out in Jeremiah 31, necessitates that community will function differently in the New Covenant. I think that I've said to you in the past that I believe that the starting point for many things we think and do has to be the differences between the Old and New Covenants. The initiation of the New Covenant is something that we celebrate and remember every time we take the cup in the Lord's Supper. I think we overlook its significance and, clearly, the New Covenant redefines community and what the church is.
That lens of looking at what's different is good. I've been looking at Matthew and it's interesting to discern what's the continuity and discontinuity between the old and the new. His gospel kind of sits as a hinge between the two canonically and in and of itself. Particularly interesting is the idea of what it means to fulfill.
Ben Witherington NT prof has written well about how as the church became more institutional they essentially brought back priest temple and sacrifice instead of living into the fulfilled new fulfillment’s of them.
Elders etc. became priests. The Lord's Supper as sacrifice of sorts could only be handled by the priests and could only take place it the temple - thinking about sanctuary language.
But the old covenant ideas aren’t abolished in Jesus and the apostles but are rather fulfilled. The priesthood is all believers under Jesus the high priest and the temple is the collective of God's people. And those OT images are everywhere in the NT.
But God's people always seem to want to go back to Egypt.
It is a profoundly sad reality that issues such as these never get a sniff on the eNews.
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As can be seen in the bold print, serious thinking is still alive in the CGGC.
And, my frustration with the CGGC mainstream is obvious in my comment about the eNews.
It struck me, reading this exchange, that what we get from the General Conference is 100 percent church, church church.
Church, not Kingdom.
And, church certainly not Jesus. Never Jesus.
My friend and I were in the midst of an exchange that ended up touching on the point that I repeatedly make that in the Gospels, Jesus barely mentions the church and that the word "church" is absent from three of the four Gospels.
And, I clarified my own understanding of church.
The truth remains, though, that, as the Spirit inspired the Gospel writers, the concept of church warranted very little attention.
The truth for the CGGC, and for 21st century Western Christianity, is that we must stop focusing on church and become obsessed with Jesus, the Lord of the church.
Notice my friend. Even in discussion of the church, Jesus is the subject. Jesus is the High Priest, disciples are the Priesthood.
For Christians, Christ, not church, must be all, and in all.
But, that's not what we're getting in, for example, the eNews. There it is truly church any time and all of the time.
And, of course, we declining and decaying.
We need to stop being churchmen, and women.
It's time, again, to be Christians...people, not of church, but of Jesus. We need, all of us, to be priests living under the authority of our High Priest.
My friend says, "But God's people always seem to want to go back to Egypt."
We have done more than that. We are back in Egypt.
We must repent.
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