grateful for Christ

As I’m starting down the path toward grad. school (as soon as I finish my undergraduate thesis this year), the thought of how to serve God by serving His church while working as a college professor has been in and out of my head.  Today it moved a little farther, into my heart.  For a while, the way I have been thinking about it is that I would likely take some of the students under my wing as a small church group.  It struck me today that a church should not have just one mature soul (not that I am yet mature) in it, unless it is just being formed.  Instead, a church should be composed of enough mature Christians that any one of them could leave/be taken suddenly without affecting the spiritual growth of the church as a whole.

In the prevalent church structure, a church is basically a group of “laypersons” operating under the tutelage of a “pastor.”  However, as it was originally conceived, a church operated with everybody having an essential, though likely duplicated, gift.  A few people would have the gift of prophecy, others service, still others teaching or knowledge, and others administration, tongues, healing, etc.  Each position (i.e., gift) would be essential, though several people could provide that service, depending on the Holy Spirit.  This all hinges on the maturity or faith of the Christians involved.

So, with regards to my thought of having my own little church-o-students, I don’t think it would be a healthy way to go.  Whatever gifts I can offer them will not suffice for their needs.  Certainly God could and would use some of them to contribute too, but there would need to be others of greater spiritual maturity.  As such, it would have to be a more geographically-based church demographic than age-based.  Therein, as they say, lies the rub.

The spiritual maturity of the church-at-large is quite disappointing, at best.  For the most part, people have substituted the word “skills” for “gifts” and think that their knack for cooking ribs is their spiritual gift.  While that may be of some value to the church, it is not a spiritual gift.

Spiritual gifts come through the power of the Holy Spirit and are spiritual in nature.  These gifts meet spiritual needs, though they may address physical needs as well.  In writing of the many spiritual gifts, Paul notes that “all of these must be done for the strengthening of the church” (1 Cor. 14:26).  The church will hardly be strengthened if none or only one of these is done.

Due to this confusion over the definition of spiritual maturity, Christian maturity is largely defined as the number of years a person has been a Christian, rather than being defined by the quality of their relationship with God.  Other times, it is defined by the number of bible verses a person can quote, how many times they say “amen” during a sermon, some aspect of their demeanor, whether or not they can babble in tongues without edifying the church through interpretation, or other such false indicators.  So, the people who are available as spiritual mentors are only as spiritually mature as they should have been when they were two or three years into the faith, if that.  Look at what brand new Christians accomplished in the infant church of Acts.  None of that is seen today, by and large, in places where there are supposedly many mature Christians.

I have no doubt that a spiritually mature eighty year-old woman who came to Christ at seventy would have far greater rapport, credibility, and spiritual effectiveness with college students than a young, hip, “revelant” thirty-two year-old pastor or even a lifelong church board member of typical spiritual maturity.  If there were many such mature Christians operating in their spiritual gifts, then I imagine some strong spiritual benefit coming to everybody in the church.  The more, the merrier, then.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I am nowhere near sufficient to the task of leading even one person spiritually.  There needs to be many more, and we must all be mature, for one another and for the less mature.  We all need to build one another up.  So, rather than start my own student church, it would be best to be part of a group of mature Christians who would live and meet within walking distance of the campus.  They would be the spiritual foundation for the students.  That way, if I or any of them could no longer be there, the church would not suffer.