Denominations and Such

This is another one of those good old-fashioned brain dumps where I write but do not edit. What I’m thinking about this morning is denominations, networks, associations, etc. I’m thinking about them because this Saturday we will have the first gathering of Ohio Valley Mission, which at this moment is made up of just three churches. It looks like we will have two other churches joining us for the meeting, maybe three. I am quite content with this as a start.

One thing I have observed is that it takes real effort for a pastor not to primarily identify himself with the largest body he belongs to. In Presbyterianism, you have a church, a presbytery, and a denomination. You can think of it as kind of like county, state, country. The church belongs to a presbytery, the presbytery to the denomination. More or less. Even though a minister has the most in common with his church, or at least you would think, he can identify with the denomination even more than his own church.

To a certain degree, this is baked into Presbyterianism because the pastor is actually not a member of his church; he’s a member of the presbytery, and in a sense, the presbytery is his church. But still, I find that they identify more with the denomination than the presbytery. I want to be clear that this is just what I have observed with the men I know. I’m not saying that this is always historically true, but I think it is presently true.

The problem is simple: what’s going on at a national level doesn’t map onto the rest of the nation equally. It’s not perfectly distributed throughout the churches. While there may be general issues that all churches share, particular issues are regional or extremely local. A church right by a military base is going to be dealing with different problems than a church, say, in a stable rural community. A church full of old people would differ quite a bit from a church full of younger people.

As a matter of fact, I was talking to David Schrock out at Grimké a couple of weeks back, and he was telling me that he had done several dozen funerals because he was in a much older church in Indiana. I’ve spent a large portion of my ministry in church plants that tended to have younger people, and therefore I’ve only done a handful.

Even when you study Scripture, you’ll notice that Colossians has a particular heresy that the church must deal with, and Corinthians has a particular sin situation that it must deal with. While those churches have so much in common, they each are waging their own local battles. If you’re only concerned about things that become issues in the national aggregate, you’re likely going to be disconnected, or not as connected as you should be, from the things most pressing to the people God has entrusted to your charge. In short, you won’t be a very good pastor.

Note that I’m saying this is a tendency and not a necessity. Does it have to happen? No. Does it often happen? Yes. It’s not an argument against Presbyterianism or national denominations. It is a caution.

Anyhow, why do guys so identify with the national over the local, even in the context of church? Obviously, there are going to be multiple factors and motivations. But one I want to zoom in on has really started to stand out to me: being part of something large gives them credibility or legitimacy. They’re not part of some rinky-dink operation that was just thrown together, but part of something big and growing, something old, anchored in history and tradition. They’re proud to be part of something like that, they want to defend it, and they’re invested in its overall health. I get it. I don’t think that way of thinking is entirely wrong. So what is the problem?

Well, this gets back to health. It could be that, at a national level, a denomination has a good reputation for having a certain type of character that doesn’t map onto many of its smaller churches. While it might be growing in numbers, are those healthy fellowships?

One tendency I have commented on before is to start churches not by having a strong lead church planter, but by building around a few local families looking for a type of ministry they associate with the character of the denomination. While this might play out well sometimes, on the whole I find that it leads to very stunted churches, run by one or two really strong-willed ruling elders, that always struggle to get a half-decent pastor to care for them. Therefore, the churches stay small, but even more importantly, don’t have the best overall spiritual health. There are a lot of churches like that in Reformed denominations.

Of course, there are also large churches that have, or were planted by, a gifted pastor with a clear vision that is at odds with the denomination. That’s bad too. But the problem is that this lack of health can be cloaked by the aggregate, by the national average, by the overall reputation.

It could be that a pastor’s own church or presbytery is unhealthy. But since he thinks the entire denomination is doing well, then he’s doing well. Just as you know the quality of a gardener by his garden, so you know the quality of a pastor by the state of his flock. Pastors may be very proud of how they are part of something large and therefore legitimate. They’re taking pride in the wrong thing. They’re not first and foremost concerned about the health of their people, and the very reputation they take advantage of, they’re slowly eroding at their local level.

This brings me back to Ohio Valley Mission. It would be cool to see it grow and really impact our defined mission field of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. But I’d rather be part of an effective team than a big team. Small and effective is much better than large and ineffective. Effectiveness in this context is the ability, through the Word and sacraments, to shepherd people into spiritual vitality in a local church. Those are the sort of men I want to be with. Men who are most concerned about the world right in front of them, the people right in front of them.