Micah 6:8

You've arrived at an interesting foundational approach on how to best make use of your spiritual fruits. Ultimately, I believe you end-up stunting your Christian growth by your avoidance of commitment, even with a seeming desire to do something positive with your faith.

Churches cannot grow and develop outreach programs without having active members they can count-on from week to week and month to month. By "count-on", I mean dependence upon the ability of certain individuals to lead, the ability of others to follow, the sharing of experiences and testimonies and...yes...tithing (of which the Bible is VERY specific in our OBLIGATION).

The "body" of Christ is not made up of islands of individuals. They consist of numerous GROUPS of individuals who move forward in common causes that are germain to their community and to the people in their congregation.

Commitment, in the case of the Body of Christ, should be much more than just our own "pact" with God. It's admirable to think you can "build-up the universal church and build into the lives in my community" on your own. But unless you're a very, very dynamic person, you'll have substantially less impact on Believers and non-believers by acting on your own than you would with the support and fellowship found in an active church that would LOVE to incorporate your passion into one of their programs.

Jesus gave us all the blueprint for fixing our lives. That blueprint expanded by the spreading of the Word and the "building" of churches. Most of Paul's letters are addressed the churches. In the New Testament, once you read beyond the Gospels, there is no spritual praise of a single person acting on his own for Christ. The commonality of the Christians in the New Testament was their connection and commitment, not actions taken on their own, independent of other Christians.

I'm not sure that you completely understood me. I fully agree with you that no man is an island and that only by working together in fellowship with other believers will we achieve all that we can as Christians. I desperately need a community around me to build me up and to work together with on common projects. When I come into fellowship with believers then I try to be as committed as I can be in their lives and in working with them even if I disagree with them. What I'm arguing is that I disagree that that local community needs to equal a local Christian society that we call a church.

What I envision for a functional community would be having Christian friends, including the outcasts and downtrodden, meet together regularly, pray together, shared their lives together, encourage one another, discuss issues together, praise God together, do projects together, etc. The way that I would see this differing from your average church as we see them today is that it would be more fluid, people would become a part of the group by simply becoming involved in it's activities. When participation ceased membership by it's nature would cease. Also, all the people would be far more involved with decision making. Instead of having the elders say "we're starting a single moms program and we need 15 volunteers", anyone in the group could say "we have a lot of single moms in our neighbourhood; what should we do about it". The group could then come to a consensus on how to minister to the woman based on their strengths, weaknesses and time constraints. This seems way more like the biblical model of church then what we currently call a church.

The reason that I'm reluctant to commit to a traditional church organization on top of committing to building into the lives of the members is that I really don't like the top down leadership structure. I have a hard time submitting to the leadership of people that I don't know well or that I don't trust the spiritual maturity of. Just because they went to seminary doesn't mean that they give a crap about social justice or the poor. How am I really expected to say, "yes, I will serve the kingdom of God in the manner that you think is best without having any or minimal say in it." I'm not referring to the leadership telling me what program to serve in I just mean that if I commit to being a part of the ministry of a specific organization I then have to have a huge amount of trust that the leadership of the church is directing the church towards better kingdom advancing ministry. You may think that I'm proud but please try to consider how you would feel about submitting to the leadership of a church that you thought missed the boat with regard to it priorities. Since I think that most churches are wasting most of their time and money it's not just as simple as finding a new church.

As for tithing, I completely disagree with you. The OT is explicit about tithing but it is also explicit about jubilee rules and leaving produce in your fields for the poor gleaners but we don't honour those rules. The tithe was a temple tax meant to feed the priests. This changes with the new covenant. Tithing is mentioned no where as a practice of the early church, only generous giving. I believe that all believers are meant to give all their money to the kingdom of God. They should first meet their basic needs and then pass on the rest. Tithing rules make people feel like they are free to do whatever they want with the other 90%. Also, if churches were more fluid like my imaginary church above there would be way less need for cash in local congregations. There would be very few, if any, hired clergy and very few building. It wouldn't matter if I gave my money to Christian aid organizations or bible distribution as there would be no expensive structure here to maintain.

Michael, please check out my study on tithing:

http://bereanbunch.com/tithing.html

I would encourage you to read it and refute it.

peace,

Paul

I posted about something similiar on my blog in a post titled Of doughnuts and distributed church connections.

oops, That should be http://bereanbunch.org/tithing.html.