Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Dealing with "The Devil"
BHT posted a while back about what I consider a horrific story related to church discipline. It occurs in an independent congregation and involves the use of local police to remove a congregant that had challenged pastoral authority. I wrote back in January that we often find the devil in the church more than out of it. This is looks like the classic example to me. I want to focus on one particular aspect here - The lack of higher authority to which the congregant could appeal the pastor's behavior.
We live in a fallen world and each of us is fallen. Sometimes in the claims of apostolic authority often made by those in clercial positions, they transmit Christ's infallibility to themselves, but even the apostles made mistakes, and given the fate of many of the congregations they founded and fostered, they were not always listened to either. As the showdown between Peter and Paul in Jerusalem shows, they relied on each other for accountability.
As leaders in the church, and I believe all Christian bloggers are leaders in one form or another, we must deliberately and firstly place ourselves into accountability with others. Whatever gifts, blessings, ordinations and anointments we may have received, we remain sinners, and it is a sure thing that we will sin in the course of our leadership activities. Only in the shared wisdom of others can we hope to find the needed checks and balances on our sinful natures.
We must remember that sin works best in deception, and deception can often be seen by others not deeply entrenched in the situation. Accountability is the only means by which we can remove the devil inside.
Who are you accountable to?
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We live in a fallen world and each of us is fallen. Sometimes in the claims of apostolic authority often made by those in clercial positions, they transmit Christ's infallibility to themselves, but even the apostles made mistakes, and given the fate of many of the congregations they founded and fostered, they were not always listened to either. As the showdown between Peter and Paul in Jerusalem shows, they relied on each other for accountability.
As leaders in the church, and I believe all Christian bloggers are leaders in one form or another, we must deliberately and firstly place ourselves into accountability with others. Whatever gifts, blessings, ordinations and anointments we may have received, we remain sinners, and it is a sure thing that we will sin in the course of our leadership activities. Only in the shared wisdom of others can we hope to find the needed checks and balances on our sinful natures.
We must remember that sin works best in deception, and deception can often be seen by others not deeply entrenched in the situation. Accountability is the only means by which we can remove the devil inside.
Who are you accountable to?
Technorati Tags:satan, accountability, sin, leadership, authority
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