Heart Tracks - Reading The Labels

     Labels.  We who would profess to be "the church" have always excelled at putting labels on beliefs, convictions, and most of all, people.  I've excelled at it myself.  I came to Christ under the ministry of a charismatic church.  They were a very good people, but I felt the leading of the Spirit to come out and enter into a different fellowship, and that leading eventually led me to the fellowship of believers I've been part of for more than 30 years.  When I told my then pastor I was leaving, he told me "those people have no power."  A label; i.e., a "people with no power."  I loved the group that I had joined, but I found that those I had come to, greatly mistrusted those I had left, who were seen as well meaning, but misguided.  The label of being "in error" was applied to them.  A few years later as a young minister in a small town, an elderly lady from the local pentecostal church came to my door.  Her deep desire was for the church in that town to come together and lift up Christ in a community that desperately needed Him.  All I heard was "pentecostal", and I still remember the wall that label threw up between she and I at that moment.  The memory grieves me.

    Since those days, the Father has enabled me to lose so many of my cherished labels, but they are still thriving within the church and new ones have arisen.  I have seen entries on Facebook that poke fun at fundamentalists, or "fundies" as they called them.  Behind the humor however, I wondered if there was not a sense of smug superiority, that they were far more "enlightened" than others.  I came across a magazine the other day called Relevant.  I don't know much about it other than the fact that its target readership would call themselves "progressives."  I am not judging, but I am wondering; do those who publish and subscribe to it see all those who might disagree with them as "irrelevant?"  On the flip side, do all those who would call themselves "concerned" see those who disagree with them as "unconcerned," and uncaring?  Are fellowships that hold to traditional styles of worship more spiritual than those who fill the platform with drum kits, keyboards and guitars?  Do the latter see the former as stuck in the past, and so, stuck in the mud?  Author Marva Dawn once said that "We don't love each other enough to listen to one another's music?"  Nor, does it seem, do we love one another enough to respect our differences, while embracing all that we do agree upon.  We trumpet our love for the lost all the while seemingly despising those who are our own.  How we must grieve the heart of Him who prayed that we would all be one in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

    In Matthew 22 the Saducees came to Jesus and asked Him a theological question concerning the resurrection.  He responded, "You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God."
Might He well be saying the same to us today?  Eugene Peterson says, "Jesus has little patience with people who love nothing better than a good 'religious discussion.'  He is interested in bringing people new life....to behold not empty disputes, but empty tombs."  We are seeing and taking part in so many empty disputes, but seeing so few empty tombs.  Yes, we need proper doctrine, and real heresy and harmful error in the church must be confronted, but in understanding and love.  If we cannot love one another enough to still be one in the midst of non-essential things we may disagree about, we deceive ourselves in thinking that we can, in Him, love a world with the life transforming power of Christ.  May we cease first reading each others labels, and instead, be able to read one another's hearts.

Blessings,
Pastor O