A Church is A Family

I was just reading this blog post by Mush Mo [/url] and starting thinking about how I feel about church disputes.

You see, I’m a big believer that a church congregation is a family. They have all the same elements as a family- the disputes, struggles, history, wayward ones- you name it, you’ll find it in a congregation. Well, at least in my congregations.

Around here, there’s 1 Catholic Church and 1 Lutheran Church. Both of course, have reverand’s sent from an upper chain of command. But you see, it’s not that way for other church’s around here. Often, there’s no formal training for their pastors. In fact, I was talking to someone who had visited our church a few month’s back with her husband who told me her husband is now a pastor. How equipped is that man to hand pastoral duties? And it’s not uncommon for pastor’s around here to have no training and it often seems they literally just rise up out of the wood work.

That lack of training and foundation is possibly what leads to the most common thing we see around here as new churches form. They don’t form out of love or a sense of family- they form because they disagree about something- often minor things. I used to marvel as one of my co-workers would talk about “that other church” that broke off from hers- the dispute had something to do with the organist. And rather than praising God for their success, she met the whole idea of them growing with quite a bit of disdain.

I just can’t imagine if our church did that- well there’d be like 100 itty bitty churches. LOL- that’s how church politics go. Everyone has an agenda, a mindset for where they’d like to see the church- even when they say they don’t have an agenda or talk of others agendas. But we learn to deal with conflict (though most often we don’t resolve it) and we handle things as a family.

Related posts:

1. Expecting The Blessings Of Family
2. 2/17-2/19/06 Gratitude
3. The Test of Family
4. I See: Family and Friends
5. Prayers For Adoption