Let me play about a little with Paul’s ‘cork on the water’ metaphor – you know the one about not being tossed back and forth by the waves or blown about here and there by every wind of dodgy teaching (Eph 4:14). Paul’s point being that Christians need an anchor in their lives – otherwise they will be at the mercy of every passing trend and gimmick that rolls through church-culture.
Even as individual Christians need such anchor points (i.e. firm, stable, Bible rooted theology) – so do churches. For just as Christians can lurch from one fad to another, so can churches. You don’t have to look far to see the exhausting run-around that many seem to be caught in – a ‘new template for ministry’ every 3 years, followed by a 5 year plan, followed by the adoption of some best-selling mega-church blueprint. Then there is the need to follow the latest fashion in ‘Spirit lead’ ministry – I mean, how 1990s to still be ‘hunting demons’ when everybody is now ‘doing Transportation’ (like the guy who kept his 1970s flares I’m just waiting for the Bible to come in again!). Decade after decade we hear the confident announcement from some quarter that God is about to ‘really do something amazing’ or that the ‘start of something really world changing’ has begun. Back and forth, up and down, here and there, this runaway train careers.
Our churches need stability - firm anchor points, an allegiance to good traditions (1 Cor 11:2), and to provide constancy for pilgrims in the fickleness of life. Don’t mishear me – I’m not arguing for stagnation, or that we fossilise in a particular era of church culture. What we do need, however, is a maturity and a realism about the world – that as much as things change, underneath they stay the same.
When was the last time you heard a sermon on making ‘it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands’? Hardly inspirational world changing stuff we think – no, we all want to be leaders, radicals, cutting edge revolutionaries – or at least we labour under the burden of such sermons, books and altar calls. Yet, that call to get on with ‘ordinary life’ is exactly what Paul tells the Thessalonians to do (1 Th 4:11). Of course some, like Paul, are called to extraordinary ministries – but even in the 1st Century most Christians weren’t Paul*. Most had ordinary jobs, went to their local ‘ordinary’ churches, got on with raising families, being responsible citizens and good neighbours. They did what the Bible asked them to do – ‘win the respect of outsiders’ while ‘holding out the word of life’ (1 Th 4:12 / Php 2:16).
They lived out their faith day by day, month by month, year by year – they were the steady & reliable 'salt & light' of their communities that avoided the boom & bust of so much contemporary Christianity. They gave stability to the church – they resisted the lure of quick fixes, flash in the pan theology and ministry by management technique. It is upon their faithfulness that the church kept going between revivals. When the storms of opposition came or the giddy rush of ‘success’ that blew others adrift - they kept grounded in God’s Word.
They were the ‘tent pegs’ that kept the apostolic tent in place over the centuries. Not much glamour in that – constantly having the tension of being pulled elsewhere, being called a ‘stick in the mud’ for your lack of enthusiasm for ‘all things new’, doing the dull dirty work of maintaining the foundations – but like those parts of body that seem ‘less honourable’ they are the very parts deserving of ‘special honour’ (1 Cor 12:23).
So be a tent peg – the church needs you more than ever.
*John Newton famously commented after applying to himself God’s promise to Paul not to be afraid because had ‘many people in this city’ (Acts 18:10) – that it wasn’t long before he realised that ‘John was no Paul & Warwick was no Corinth’.
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