A while ago, we were considering a young church that was experiencing a number of problems. I speculated that because they fundamentally had a worldview that agreed with the Greek worldview, they did not understand God's worldview. They valued different things than God valued. They valued things differently than God valued them.
This church valued gifted men. it valued them in such a way that it created factions in the church. I sometimes wonder if the factions began because people valued different gifts. They followed the man because he was especially gifted in a particular area.
When a person begins to follow Jesus, God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, begins to live with the person in a special way. If the person follows Jesus, then he has that relationship with the Spirit. If the person has that special relationship, then the Spirit grants him a gift, a supernaturally empowered ability.
In this church, these abilities caused a pulling away from one another. But that's not the plan at all. The spirit grants these abilities to pull god's family together.
Each person has needs. Each group has needs, If the group is organized in any way, they will need to address personal and group needs eventually. The group will organize and initiate something to address these needs.
If there is a group comprised of unmarried, college students, they have no need for a nursery. But put a group of college students together, there will be boy-girl pairings, marriages and children. Once, there are children, the group must develop a philosophy, a strategy and a plan of action for dealing with children in the meetings. One can follow the common plan of separating people in age related groups with it resulting issues. Or one can decide that children need to grow up, and one of the problems of modern society is too low expectations of children's behavior. So, they plan to keep the children involved with the adults as much as possible. This is one issue. And these are a couple of solutions to that issue.
God's solution is combining within a group, gifted people capable of dealing with those problems. All the resources necessary for dealing all the issues already reside within the group. And the resources are the gifted people. Some of those gifted people, God gave to equip, to restore or to train other gifted people to serve in more complete, fuller and more sure ways.
The combination of this preparation by the Holy Spirit and by other people results in each individual functioning better, and the group functioning better.
The human body functions, grows and reproduces when there is clean air, clean water, wholesome food and appropriate exercise of body, mind and spirit. If each part does it job, it will produce a more healthy situation.
But god has added something else that brings the whole thing to a critical mass, and pushes it past the tipping point.
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