controversial household rules

"It's a trap," they said, fearing I would get embroiled in a post-seminar blog war. So some close friends counseled me not to do the Equip '07 seminar, Guiding Principles for the People of God in a Postmodern World.

But I felt that God would have me equip the body from an apostolic perspective rather than the typical teacher's point of view; as another Paul put it, "apostles… teachers… Their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work… until we come to… unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son…"

Because of the great need that I sense for people to understand the destabilizing implications of postmodernism for the church, with prayer and trepidation, I went for it.

Because we would wrestle with the controversial, emotionally charged topics of inherited and emergent and emerging churches I decided to do something radical… create a safe place for discussion by applying God's household rules!

God gives rules of conduct to those who are part of His household. Paul wrote to Timothy, “you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” (1 Ti. 3:15)

So, for example, we agreed to obey the last verse of 1 Corinthians 14, “everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.” “Orderly” is used one time in the passage. How much more then did we need to agree to intentionally edify one another (οικοδομεω is used 7x in the passage)!

Historically the Grace Brethren have been committed to biblical truth, biblical relationships and biblical mission. So in our discussions we sought to live by God's household rules for cultivating biblical relationships:


• Practice maintaining the unity of the Spirit (Eph. 4:2-3)
• Practice speaking the truth in love toward the goal of peace (Eph. 4:2-3, 25)
• Practice edification (1 Cor. 14:3,4,5,12,17,26)
• Practice discipleship (Mt. 28:19-20)
• Practice focusing on God’s work rather than controversies (1 Tim. 1:4)
• Practice praying for everyone (1 Ti. 2:1)
• Practice being examples in life, love, faith, purity (1 Ti. 4:12)
• Practice loving your neighbor as intensely as Jesus loves you (Jn. 13:34-35).

Since not everyone felt able to live perfectly by these household rules :-), we can stopped to pray, asking God to change us, sanctify us according to His truth, and by His Spirit, to enable us to live according to His truth.

In prayer, we committed to practice biblical truth and biblical relationships during our time together. God answered our prayers. And I have been happily enjoying a peaceful, blog-war free post-seminar existence! May He now cause us to be more fruitful as we embark on biblical mission in a postmodern world.
“As the differences among true Christians get greater, we must consciously love” more intensely. We “cannot expect the world to understand doctrinal differences, especially in our day when the existence of truth and absolutes are considered unthinkable even as concepts.… But when they see differences among true Christians who also show an observable unity, this will open the way for them to consider the truth of… Christ’s claim that the Father did send the Son.” (Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of the Christian)