Party Spirit

My church body, like many other church bodies, struggles with internal disagreements. While we are all clear and agree about what we believe, teach, and confess, many contentions have arisen in how we live out those beliefs and what those beliefs mean for the daily life of believers, congregations, and our church at large. Today, my church body, much like secular culture, seems to be dominated by a “party spirit.” There are two primary “sides” in my denomination – although each may take slightly different forms and expressions. Each side promotes its own candidates for church office and offers its own priorities. Each side has its favored internal institutions and favored ways of doing things.

I once stood very clearly on one side of this divide. That is, until the side that I supported decided on a course of action that raised the specter of continuing division and conflict. The proposed action was to offer an organizational restructuring plan that placed most of the levers of power and control of our church institution firmly in the hands of one office.

For a church body, centralization of power and authority can only lead to abuses, doctrinal drift, coercion in forms of worship and practice, and disagreement. This is caused by giving authority to the party in power to require, or compel through other means, what they consider important, rather than what is prescribed in our “Norma Normans,” which for us is God’s Word.

Church bodies, you see, are closer to public weal institutions than to corporations. The latter are driven and organized for profit; the former for the public good. As a church, we do have to steward our resources well; we do have to manage facilities well; we do have to watch our budgets carefully, but we do it for the sake of “our public” – the people of God who generously support the church’s mission, for the glory of God! We do this through sound, transparent leadership, not through consolidation of power.

I could not, for the life of me, see how consolidation of power, in spite of the clear teaching of history and our own understanding of human nature and its inevitable move toward behaving in a self-promoting, self-interested way, could serve a church body. That is precisely a problem that existed when my church body broke off from the larger body to which it once belonged centuries ago.

For me trying to warn about what could happen if we unified the power structures of our church, became a “hill to die on” and to some extent, I became persona-non-grata for it. Folks that once considered me a friend, would literally – and I do mean literally – turn their face from me. And this made clear to me something that many people already knew, but which had eluded me: our party spirit had made us dysfunctional. Our party spirit has made it easy to lambast, criticize, and condemn each other, justifying such behavior with the highest platitudes possible: “We do it for the mission; we do it for the doctrine; we do it to preserve what we value; we do it because…” you name the high-sounding moral reason.

An interesting side-note: the “party” that was most adamantly against the unification of the church under one office won the day at the ballot and has taken the reins of power that the other party created with gusto. And the “party” that was most for unifying the reins of power under one office is now whining about the fact that authority is too centralized. Ahhh – how the worm turns!

That is the way it is for us “sinner-saints” on this side of eternity. To many, we look more like the squabbling secular politicians that divide people, rather than the sons and daughters of the living God. Our party spirit is a danger. It may ultimately be the biggest reason mainline church bodies are losing favor and participation. We end up looking more like the secular culture than the Bride of Christ.

May our good and gracious God forgive us and help us move away from a “party-spirit-driven” church body and toward a “Holy-Spirit-inspired” band of disciples of the King – Jesus Christ. We need to unite under Christ and set aside the bickering and division and move toward doing what Christ Jesus called us to do: Be that place, be those people, that allows the light and love of Christ to shine forth.