Pastor Powell's Column

September 2010

Encouraging Hearts, Heads, & Hands

Plastic Christianity. Who needs it?

Authentic followers of Jesus are not part-time disciples. Commitment to Christ touches every part of life. Perhaps it’s more comfortable to reduce Christianity to one compartment. More manageable. But Christ is not someone to be managed. He manages us.

At The Fellowship we are learning how to disciple one another in a heartfelt devotion to God, in a reasoned and rigorous understanding of God’s truth and in faithful living by God’s commands to love. True discipleship encompasses heart, head, and hands. Anything less is a shoddy substitute. Unbalanced. Distorted.

A growing understanding of God’s Word is indispensable to enlighten minds that is so clouded by sinful human fallacies. A head that knows God’s truth fires the devotion of the heart and guides the service of the hands.

Now imagine the church that is all head, but heartless and handless. As knowledge grows, so grows pride. Doctrines are refined, debates are won, but a cold pall signals that the life of Christ has departed.

The heart enthralled in worship, wonder, and love for God brings knowledge to its proper goal and fills all duty with a passion that befits divine service.

But the church that is centered only on heart experience, without adequate head or hands, can become an exciting ride to disaster. Unless God’s people are nurtured in God’s truth, they fall easy prey to false doctrines. And lives not disciplined to the lifestyle of the Master eventually get entangled in train wrecks of money, sex, or power.

When Jesus called people to repent, that meant leaving one lifestyle and turning to a new lifestyle—one governed by virtues of honesty, humility, purity, mercy, justice, and, above all, love. This is the proof of our doctrine and devotion.

Yet a church eager to prove faithful obedience can become a frenetic center of changing the world, keeping the rules, and busy “Churchianity.” Headless hands lose sight of the King and His kingdom, and heartless hands begin to feel only drudgery, not delight in serving.

Surely these three unbalanced versions of Christianity are severe caricatures. Few churches get that extreme. Yet these are the descriptions of inauthentic Christianity so common in today’s rebellion against “organized religion.”

So many books and conferences today propose “the answer,” often staking out one of the three elements—doctrine, devotion, or duty—as the cure all. The over-reaction that neglects, or even denigrates the other two only leads to more imbalance.

At The Fellowship, can we keep our balance in this day of undermining the foundations? The answer is not a clownish balancing act of doctrine manual, devotional journal and duty roster. Rather it’s in the organic unity of head, heart, and hands. We find this in Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The more closely we follow Jesus – the authentic Jesus God has given for His church – the more we will truly come His Way into God’s presence, understand His Truth, and live the Life of Christ’s love in the world. This is the goal in our services, our groups, our children’s and youth ministries, and our outreach locally and around the world – in all things to lift up Jesus Christ. Not just as a figurehead or a banner, but as the One in whom we discover all the fullness of the Heart’s experience, the Head’s understanding, and the Hands’ service.