Defending God

This year, the 20th anniversary of my ordination as an elder, has been in some respects a year of reflection. The Annual Conference has provided a series of retreats, "Called to Fruitfulness," that is meant to not only help us reflect on the past but to dream and prayerfully plan for the future. In that spirit, I've been thinking lately about my 22 1/2 years as a pastor, and because they're easier to remember, many of the recurring complaints I've gotten as a pastor keep coming to mind. Most of them have been in the category of what I would call "defending God."

As Christian people, we believe Jesus is the way, the truth and the life (see John 14:6). But we often get the way we worship and serve Jesus mixed up with the Jesus we worship and serve. In other words, we focus on the WAY things are done, believing the WAY we do things is the only way to do them. Any time you get anything (like a procedure or a plan) mixed up with your faith, it gets messy. We end up defending a METHOD or a PLAN rather than the PURPOSE behind it. And sometimes we get convinced that we must defend that WAY. We think we're defending God, protecting God's honor somehow. What we're really doing is protecting or defending a way of doing things that has little or nothing to do with God himself.

Let me explain what I mean by sharing some of my experience.

One of the earliest disagreements I had in the church was over the matter of communion. When it was my privilege to preside over the sacrament, I made a small change in the printed liturgy. I said "juice" rather than "wine." The next day, my senior pastor at the time got a scathing letter from a member of the congregation, criticizing "the boy" (that's how he referred to me) for daring the change the liturgy. Now, besides the fact that this person completely ignored Matthew 18 and didn't talk to me directly (ever), I was left wondering...did it matter to God whether I said "juice" or "wine"? It mattered to the children I often tried to explain communion to, who asked me about why we said "wine" when it was really "juice." This person believed he was somehow defending God's honor, but I don't think the communion was any less a sacrament because one word was changed.

See what I mean? We think we're defending God when really we're trying to defend our own preferences.

That same idea shows up when we complain about certain songs that are used, or where things are put in the church building, or the color of paint on the walls, or the color of carpet on the floors, or whether or not coffee cups are allowed in the worship space. Folks, none of those are Biblical issues. None of those are anything Jesus was concerned about.

Do we need to be reminded? Jesus was focused on the hurting people. He was focused on the one in prison with no one to visit, the hungry child out on the street, the naked stranger and the one who is ill. In fact, Jesus indicated (Matthew 25) that these are the things that will be the focus of the last judgment, not whether or not the altar decorations were the right color or the Christmas trees were decorated properly.

I'm not saying we should be sloppy about those things. God deserves our best. But people deserve our grace. In the final analysis, God is big enough to defend himself; he does not need churches full of people focused on details that simply will not last. He calls his church not to defend him but to represent him among the least, the last and the lost. That's where he is.


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