An ideology-driven church?

As I mentioned to some of you earlier, our church here in Seattle used to belong to a church-planting movement. Sad to say, politics had a lot to do with why we left. At the time, I was leading a small church-planting effort in Washington, D.C., along with a couple close friends. (I've since returned to Seattle; our group in D.C. dissolved.)

At the time, my pastor in Seattle was increasingly out-of-synch with the philosophy and practice of the church movement we belonged to. Specifically, he was exhibiting, ahem, "revivalist" tendencies; the sort which Rodney Howard-Browne is criticized for. Because the movement leadership did not agree with him, they were maneuvering to cut our church off from "daughter" churches under our sphere of influence.

When I first knew about these difficulties, I was torn. On the one hand, I loved and respected my pastor, and knew he was the real deal in terms of his life example. (He's the only practicing neurosurgeon/pastor I know of, and personally worked for months to bring my dad to Christ.) On the other hand, I was indoctrinated with a certain way of looking at our church movement. The way we were taught, our movement was a single church body in the same sense that most people think about their local congregation. The entire organization was structured like a multi-national company, and the movement's elders could dictate things at the local level, including removing local church pastors. Like other movements of its type, you were supposed to trust authority completely.

Basically, I believed that our movement was fulfilling Christ's Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. Our method was to plant cell-type churches, since that is what we saw in the Book of Acts. We planned meticulously, and many people sacrificed their lives (not their blood exactly, but their life nonetheless) to carry out these plans.

The way I saw our movement, we were akin to the Communists, who sacrificed their lives for their ideology. My view was that we ought to be militantly committed to our cause, operating as a grass-roots movement that would revolutionize the world. And I was certain God wanted it done the way our movement had it planned.

Now, looking back, I can see many wrong things in this argument. It wasn't something I saw easily because I had been indoctrinated to see God's word in a certain light. When the window shutters were opened and light flooded in, figuratively, I realized that church-planting is only one aspect of God's plan. I realized that there is only one undivided Body of Christ in God's eyes, His universal church which comprises all believers, and that the only other proper sense of church is the local congregation--movements don't count as a "church." (For the longest time, I struggled with the thought that I had left "the church" when in actuality I had left a movement.)

Moreover, I see now that it was wrong to be driven by ideology in the same way as the Communists. Why? Because that type of devotion to an ideal results in an "ends-justify-the-means" mentality. The Communist's goal, actually, is laudable--it was their use of violence and habitual lapse into dictatorship that made them evil. Similarly, our movement's goal was good, to fulfill the Great Commission, but our commitment to our ideology made us resort to politically tactics, human manipulation, and appeals to pride and fear in order to achieve our goals.

I didn't realize this until I saw the way my pastor was being treated. That caused me to re-examine my beliefs and prompted serious Bible study. In the end, I said goodbye to ideology. Love and zeal, yes. Ideology, no.