CONCERNING ANTI-CHURCH RAPS

I thought of entitling this essay Why I believe in the institutional church, but that is a thesis for another time. I can say in passing that I believe in established religion because I am an heir of so many blessings that it has bequeathed. The Bible is one. Fuss as we will about organized religion, it was the great heroes of the church who created and preserved the scriptures, and that not without persecution unto death. There is also great literature and art, and even civilization itself. It was the church who gave us Knox and Calvin and Zwingli and Luther and Savonarola and Campbell and Lipscomb. And even more, it is established religion that has given the world “the salt of the earth,” rank and file believers such as read this journal, people who are such a tremendous personal blessing to me.

I may criticize the church, but my quarrel is a lover’s quarrel. I love the church for what she has been, is now, and shall be. Her nature is such that her hardy sons will ever be seeking to reform her, and so her most gallant leaders have always been reformers. The church is always growing ugly cancers and is always in need of surgery, and yet she has always produced the very sources for her self-cleansing. Her reformations have always been from within, staged by her own children, never from without and never by those who leave her.

But my thesis here is of a different sort, though related, and it grows out of my concern for an emerging negativism among those who would reform the church. This is especially evident in house churches and prayer groups across the country, where such meetings are often allowed to degenerate into anti-church raps. And sometimes it is even worse, for some people, now separated from the church or having severe problems with their congregations, issue forth in bitter harangues and acrimonious protestations against “the establishment” and everyone connected with it. They show little or no hope for the churches they represent, and they now look with disdain at their former associates or at those they are now criticizing.

I recall one such brother in a southern state that had driven some distance to one of my mini-meetings in a home. He had actually come for an anti-church rap session, and he had plenty of rapping to do, all negative. He wanted us to “give ’em hell” for the way he and others were being treated. He would have been pleased if our session had been a hearing of our mutual woes, afflictions and deprivations. I had no difficulty in understanding what he had been through, and of course I was sympathetic, but I could not believe that his was a Christian response.

I told the group of a house church of our people in San Antonio who met mostly to pray. Men and women would get on their knees and pray lovingly for their elders and preachers, the very ones who were giving them such a hard time in their efforts to be free in Christ. They were continuing to attend their various congregations as peacemakers, seeking God’s will in a difficult situation, where some had been removed from the eldership and others had had classes taken from them.

I told of the sister in California who was “fired” from everything when she became charismatic and finally withdrawn from. Even so her letters were love letters, her prayers were full of hope and grace, and she kept right on going among them, loving them more than ever. I told of the couple in Kansas who were deprived of their rights in the congregation because of what their son-in-law believed, but who kept right on being dynamos of love, kept on believing, kept on smiling, kept on working. This couple too has a house church going, along with their congregational attendance, but the meetings are permeated with love, peace, and joy and attracts a lot of youth. But they are not anti-church raps.

This kind of talk made our brother all the more uncomfortable. He insisted that the brethren he was dealing with could be treated in no such way, for it would be casting pearls before swine. I suggested that part of our problem could be wounded pride. The very idea of treating me like that! There I am the best teacher in the church and they’ll not let me open my mouth! They won’t even call on me to lead a prayer! And at one time I was one of the top cats, everyone looking up to me as somebody.

And how about Jesus? How did the church treat him and how did he react? When he returned to his hometown for a visit at the synagogue, they not only eyed him with suspicion, reminding themselves that he was once one of the boys about town, but they finally tried to kill him, especially when he began to talk about racial prejudice. But Jesus didn’t swell up with wounded pride. He kept right on with his visits to the synagogues, always loving, always believing, always hoping. And when the church leaders finally delivered him up to the Romans to be crucified, even then there was no anti-church rap or soliloquy. He did not open his mouth with one word of complaint. He prayed for them, with no taint of self-pity or self-righteousness, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Our brother did not buy this kind of talk. Jesus never encountered the kind of thugs there were back at his church! And they were far beyond the hope of any prayers. “Come out from among them and be ye separate” was what his Bible told him to do, and off he went, concluding that my meeting was vapid and idealistic.

This kind of thing grieves me and we have a lot of it across the land. Almost certainly we will gain our freedom in Christ in the modern church only through suffering and persecution. Preachers are going to lose their jobs. Elders are going to be removed by hook or crook. Teachers who do such innocent things as to read Mission or attend a Billy Graham rally will be removed from their classes. Free congregations are going to be exposed and harassed. Journals are going to be banned. New ideas are going to be thwarted. Sweet, spiritual people are going to be ignored and rejected, perhaps even excommunicated, for nothing more than being charismatic.

This is the price of freedom, this the cost of reforming the church. Some of us will have to give a lot and suffer a lot in order to gain freedom for others. So there is no reason to be surprised when such trials come. The only question is how are we to respond. Certainly not with bitterness and resentment. This only denies us of our freedom and puts us back where we were. If we really decide to come to Jesus, then let us be like him and respond tc the church of our time as he responded to the church of his day. We change the church by loving her and dying for her. Criticize? By all means, but always with love. Criticize the church as you would your old Mother, only to help and never to destroy, and always with sweet reasonableness.

These anti-church raps are bad for the soul. They gravitate to the level where you have a bunch of disgruntled, embittered, and embattled folk who compete with each other in painting their churches scarlet. They all like to tell why they left, whether it be Baptist, Episcopal or Church of Christ, while I’d much rather hear why they have stayed and what the Lord is doing through them in their ministry of love. I like to relate to a disgruntled Baptist my gratitude that the Baptists have held out in our corrupt world and have given us the likes of Charles Spurgeon, A. H. Newman, George Truett, and Billy Graham.

This negativism pervades even some charismatic meetings. Some tongue-speakers prove that you can be pro-Spirit and anti-church. And anti-church usually means anti-preacher, anti-missions, anti-organization, and all the rest. Some can fuss about the establishment for awhile and then pray in the Spirit for awhile. And one sometimes gets the notion that such folk are thankful that they are not like other people, especially the unspiritual church crowd. One brother writes of his disappointment with the rap sessions in his area, attended by people who talk of being free in Christ, for they sometimes turn into laughing bees —laughing at preachers, at elders, at the church —and he sees more derision and condescension than tender loving care.

It is easy for anti-church raps to yield to Satan in the cultivation of self-righteousness. Those involved have often left their churches and move in the small world of their own elite group. They become super saints who are far more interested in sharing their unique experiences and enrolling others than they are in sharing their time and wealth in taking Jesus to the down-and-outs or in working for social justice in their communities.

One of my charismatic brothers would visit me on the college campus, where I was counseling with youth with homosexual problems, emotional problems, racial problems. Some girls would come to me instead of the dean, fearing they were pregnant and agonizing over what to do. I would get doctors to check them on the Q. T., and in those cases where they were pregnant I would urge them to inform their parents. My brother could walk into this kind of world with apparent indifference, showing little interest in the sticky problems of the twilight zones of a university campus. Dressed nattily and driving a sport car, he always wanted to talk about the Holy Spirit and was always ready to enroll people into his life of praise.

I am not sure that it is good for such folk to get together in what amounts to an exclusive club, exulting in their spirituality. They’d do better to team up with Quakers and clean latrines and build adobe houses. Or gather up a bunch of poor white and black kids and take them on a picnic and a movie. God likes that kind of praise too!

But in closing I must make it clear that this does not apply to all my charismatic brothers or to all prayer groups and house churches. In many such gatherings I see no such self-righteousness or negativism. For such I thank God. I would only urge that such gatherings be made as inclusive as possible. Church leaders should be invited, even if they do not come. They should be invited, lovingly, again and again, and no house church should be satisfied with only super-saints attending. Let it be a means of reaching out, of praying together for the church. Any negative, destructive criticism should not be encouraged. Let it be a meeting for praise, prayer and study. Let God be glorified. Let it be a Jesus rap, not any kind of anti rap. —the Editor