Building on the Foundation

In the midst of revising my post on authority in the church (after a lot of feedback and more study), I realized that the main change to that post would be a great standalone article as well. There seems to be a lot of ideas about how churches should function, who should run them, what can be done inside the official meetings of those churches, etc, but one huge question remains that defines all those other things.  What is the “Church?”  I think we often think of a church as something we go to, and actually, that’s not terribly far from the truth, but in a different way than it’s often thought of. A church isn’t the building, a church isn’t even an organization, and a church isn’t exactly the people either. All of the mistaken ideas of what a church is come from a poor translation of the words used for church in the New Testament. In fact, the idea of a church, to hear many speak of it, seems to have sprung into existence out of nothing immediately upon the events of Acts 2....

The question of authority versus power is a vital one, especially where it concerns the Bible. It's a question that encompasses order and structure in the Church and the roles in the family that God put in place. The keyword is “role” since this is the box within which authority and power exist, and it's the box that each of us operates out of in the family and church. Our role dictates the authority given to us by God, and on the other side of things, it also details the authority we are not given.  It is the abuse of power that leads to negative outcomes from leadership. When a person in a position of authority begins to take more power than their position warrants, it is a recipe for tyranny. In God's system of doing things, power is used by righteous authority in the way that has been granted by God, and they do not take more power to themselves than their role grants to them.   This is the way kings were supposed to operate in Israel, but they failed. Remember, the rol...