The World's Most Unlikely Radical, or Those Pesky Nicolaitans 27 ½

“But don't you find

it interesting how, most of the time,

your self-interpreting seems to coincide

with what's deep inside

your heart's desires?

Seems rather convenient, doesn't it?”

Beautiful Eulogy feat. Propaganda, ‘Symbols and Signs’, Instruments of Mercy (2013)

Unlikely, is the idea here, because this probably isn't somewhere you'd expect to find a kids' playpark. But I do love kids' playparks in unexpected locations.

Those of you who've been following my blog for some time (hi, loyal readers! Love you lots) may recall that about six months ago, I trotted out a little series in which I espoused some fairly left-field thinking on the matter of church governance. I made some remark at the time to the effect that it would have been entirely feasible to continue publishing posts dealing with various aspects of the same subject for at least the rest of the calendar year, but, for the sake of my sanity and yours, I determined to drag myself away from the topic after a mere five instalments, and spent the following few months’ worth of posts rambling about other matters. As you may already have guessed, however, I thought the present moment an appropriate one to briefly revisit the question of Those Pesky Nicolaitans.

Here's the TL:DR as to my view: I think that Jesus hates ecclesiastical hierarchies. I think that the bestowal of a special leadership status on any individual within a Christian community violates the principle that the body of Christ only has one Head, and the rest of us are all brothers and equals. I think that no exercise of any spiritual gifting entails any assumption of spiritual authority over other believers, and to suppose that it does represents a misuse of the gifting. I think that all this is plainly laid out in scripture, as is the warning that the Church at large is going to get it wrong an awful lot. I think that it’s the responsibility of every one of us as believers to be increasing one another in holiness through the exercise of our giftings - and I think that that's humungously exciting.

This represents, as I say, some fairly left-field thinking, at least in most of my usual social circles, and so the past six months of bloggerly silence on the issue have not in any way corresponded to six months of inertia regarding it in the non-online portions of my life. I have tried to explain why I've not been showing up on Sundays for the past little while to a good number of siblings in Christ, and there's been pushback. I was expecting there would be, and indeed I'm glad there has been. Had none of my Christian friends who subscribe to more conventional views on the matter questioned my decisions or tried to persuade me back round to something approaching their own way of thinking, I'd have feared that they didn't actually care for me and my walk with Jesus as much as I'd supposed they did. Even as I beg people not to worry about me, I have to admit that in their shoes, I'd probably be worried about me too. And they've made some good arguments as to why they should be. I've debated, I've considered, I've gone back to the scriptures and thoroughly frustrated myself over them, I've prayed from my heart and remained just as frustrated, I've reasoned, I've wrestled, and I've teetered on the edge of taking a softer approach on several occasions. Still, as things stand, I'm still where I was; if anything, I've dug my heels in harder.

And the point I really want to make today pertains to something I suspect has played a major role in my granting myself permission to do that digging in of heels, namely a question that more than one person - some Christian, some not - has posed upon my explaining my Strange and Unusual Opinions as sketched out above. Well, they say, isn't this really just a matter of preferred worship style? Why delegitimise what works for somebody else just because it doesn't work so well for you? Maybe for you, with your personality, this more flat, unstructured, fluid format you describe is a really helpful way to engage with God, but might other people with different personalities not benefit more from a format that includes, to a greater or lesser degree, some form of leadership structures?

Now, this actually constitutes a far graver accusation against me than I think the people who have made it have realised. Sometimes, granted, differences in how people do church really are down to nothing more sinister or significant than personal or social or cultural preferences: music style is perhaps the most obvious example. On trivial matters like that, though, we're not to dig our heels in; rather, we're to be as flexible and accommodating as possible for the sake of our brothers and sisters. The statement I'm making about church leadership is that it's a contravention of God's commands, that he literally hates it, that to uphold it is a serious offence against him; if my making such claims were to be attributed merely to my indulging my own preferences about the style of collective worship, what a deplorable, self-seeking false teacher that would cast me as! What a wolf among the sheep, beckoning them astray from the safety of God's path for the sake merely of facilitating my own enjoyment! What a Jezebel, taking the desires of my flesh and declaring God's approval over them, along with his displeasure over anything contrary to them!

The variety of butterfly known as a Jezebel. Still not very fair on the poor butterfly.

It is, it must be admitted, completely true that sometimes the biases contained in my personality, though fairly neutral in and of themselves, can have unfortunate effects on what my practice of my faith looks like. For instance, because I'm naturally a very academic person, I'm prone to turning following Jesus into an intellectual exercise instead of something I pursue with my whole being. This, I recognise, is categorically Bad. It demands the rebukes of others, my own determination to strive against sin, and a whole lot of help from the Holy Spirit, without whom sanctification is entirely impossible, to correct it. And I do try to be really honest and self-critical about where particular facets of my personality might lead me into particular errors. I have previously encouraged you my lovely readers to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism towards any theological argument I make that chimes suspiciously well with my own personal preferences, and I continue to encourage you thus.

But to suggest that my views on Those Pesky Nicolaitans chime suspiciously well with my own personal preferences is basically just hilarious, and I'll tell you for why: if anybody out there has a personality with an inbuilt proclivity towards structure, hierarchy, tradition, and all these things I'm arguing we should throw unceremoniously out of the figurative window, well, it's I. I'm an ISTJ. I love order and neatness and clear organisation, everything having a set place and staying in it. I love arbitrary and pointless tradition, the doing of things in a particular way for no reason other than that that's how they've always been done (within reason, of course). I love having explicitly defined responsibilities that don't overlap with other people's, and designated superiors to go to with problems or queries. I even sort of love being told what to do. Following someone else's lead is naturally my most comfortable posture; typically, I only take initiatives on behalf of a group if I don't trust that the task at hand is going to get done if I don't. Chaos and anarchy and spontaneity and blurredness of lines are all things I naturally recoil from. And so, if the issue at hand were merely the proclivities of my own peculiar personality (and peculiar it certainly is, in both senses), then, crikey, I would surely be the very last person in the world to want to tear down church leadership structures.

I hasten to add that this in itself doesn't constitute a reason to suppose that I'm right. Each of our personalities is naturally going to find some of God's commands easier to hear than others; the mere fact that something goes against one of our personal preferences doesn't automatically single it out as a just and obedient choice. After all, our preferences are different, but God's commands to the Church apply equally to all its members. All the same, though, the clash between my natural inclinations and my theological stance as regards church governance does reassure me that, on this matter at least, I'm probably not just indulging the desires of my own flesh and calling it holiness. I'm the world's most unlikely radical here, and yet a radical I am. Naturally, I love structure and hierarchy and tradition; in other contexts - my old secondary school, for example, or the Brownie and Guide units I help to lead - I have consistently enjoyed and valued and defended them; but when I see them in the Church, I'm seized by this impassioned desire to raze them to the ground and scatter the ashes to the four winds. That's a bit weird. Evidently enough, something has interfered here that has the power to overcome my natural inclinations. And I don't think it's too far fetched to identify said something as the conviction of the Holy Spirit, achieved through the scriptures.

So that's a whole lot of rambling about me and where I'm at; let me leave you with a bit of a broader exhortation on the same theme. My Bible-in-5-years reading plan had me in Numbers 15 this Tuesday just gone, which ends with a command to make tassels on garment corners, “for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the LORD, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after.” It's normal enough for little chunks of instruction to be capped off with “I am the LORD your God” in the Law, but the final verse of this chapter is more emphatic than that: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the LORD your God.” This in the context, by the way, that God just decreed a man be stoned to death for gathering sticks on Shabbat. The point is, it really, really matters that we be constantly striving and choosing to do what God has commanded we do rather than what our own heart and eyes desire to do. That’s not easy, because naturally, our own heart and eyes will happily encourage us to prostitute ourselves after virtually anything that promises pleasure. So we need to stick constant reminders of God's commands in front of them, tassels or otherwise, because indulging our personal preferences at the expense of obeying him is a sure-fire route to death. The stakes are that high. There are no trivial matters when it comes to what God has commanded. We need to be robustly cynical of our own motivations and ready to challenge fellow-believers about theirs as well. This question of whether my holding of a particular theological view amounts to merely an indulgence of my own fleshly desires is a really important one, a really grave accusation. So thank God that when Jesus died for us, the fleshly self with all its disobedient lusts died too. Thank God that we are born again as spiritual people able to learn to conduct ourselves according to spirit instead of flesh. And thank God that, because through faith in Jesus we have died with him to self and sin and in him been resurrected righteous, that status of righteousness can never be revoked or diminished, any more than our Lord's own status of righteousness ever can.

I am the world's most unlikely radical here. But then, chief of sinners that I am, I'm kind of the world's most unlikely righteous person too, and yet that happened. Turns out all things are possible with God. Now where have I heard that before?