Scrub teaching, the communion service, and intercessory prayer, as inappropriate, from public viewing because Church of God – ekklesia – business is something intimate. When members of the church come together it is not for public consumption. It has to make one wonder what kind of accountability Christian leaders can report when the people they lead are at a distance from the appointed worship leader. They are distant from the Christ that they are naming, so it is no surprise that especially since the covid19 pandemic struck church is a public deal with most of the church’s valuables remaining unidentified due to private preferences dominating the flow of grace from Christ to the Church, whose focus can never escape the unity that belongs to Christ’s body.

My book and my second-rate commentary for sale or free

It’s really does not matter whether people are selling or giving stuff away.  Mass distribution of God’s word is abominable because the follow up to casting out the gospel net requires a response which ideally ends in conversion, baptism, and reception into a local congregatio.  Teaching also requires the questions of people who are learning all the examination of what people are getting from reading the Scriptures. Without questions and contributions coming from the audience the essential gifts of Christ to the Church are superfluous.

Gifts to the church

And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; [FOR HOW LONG?] until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, [TO WHAT END?] to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. [WHAT IS IN IT FOR US?] As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”

Eph 4:11-16, NASB

In the snares of Satan

Churches have been manipulated into doing big public things that can only properly be associated with capitalism or Mammon, to use a biblical term, and they dare to call what they do “Church”.  If you want to see how obscene Western Christianity has become just spend an hour watching programs on TV pitching for money to help the poor in foreign lands, while on the streets of America, while in the congregation of those same “churches” there are impoverished souls who do not seem to matter.  They actually think that the righteousness of Christ has nothing to do with corruption in a political system or blatantly criminal behavior by elected officials.   Man! Has the devil got them! Some of these entities, trapped by the devil in discrimination and greed, are not even churches. They are loose corporate entities run by individuals in partnership with other individuals to enrich themselves. This is a well known fact.

Bodyworks the world cannot appreciate

In a local congregation there is an inevitable personal contact with all who come through the doors.  TV and radio can only hope that people who tune in will contact the programmers.  There are few operators who are engaged with the believer and the unbeliever in biblical ways.  The Church is Christ’s body in focused activity with the Head at centre stage and in first place in every situation. The world cannot understand much less absorb the proceedings, even when the proceeding is a ritual (Communion, for example).

Church business beyond the grasp of outsiders

As long as preachers and teachers think that speaking for 30, 45 minutes or an hour and getting an amen or even a nay-men from the audience something is responsible Christ and the apostles would not recognize the assembly. The point of teaching is to facilitate change in at least four essential ways: reproof, correction, training in righteousness, and equipping for good works (2 Timothy 3:16-17, NASB).

Church business that never happens in public or private

If somone is going to offer reproof, correction, training and equipping apart for what the Scriptures teach people will be at risk of being pulled in every direction. We should expect a biblical precedent in practice or plain teaching, and anything short of that less should get our nod. Sure enough people can walk into our service from off the street and see what we are doing, but they have no right to be sitting at the table with the same provo6leges as those who have confessed Chirst as Saviour. Nor can the instruction in Christian thought from a pastor mean anything to a person off the street. If believers want to keep hearing the same things over and over, receive no experience of growth in grace, then we can keep doing the public monologue. People bitten by the kingdom of heaven are curious, they search for answers. The discoveries are public, written in Scripture, for all to see, so let the two-way edification proceed in the privacy of the environment between Christ and his disciples.

“After these things he left Athens and went to Corinth.”

(Act 18:1, NASB)

Paul and the Corinthian experience

The Corinthian church is famous for the fact that there are two letters addressed to her by Paul.  There are also undercurrents of unspeakable vice (incest), disorderly bahaviour in the assemblies of the church, and a general penchant for prostitution and homosexuality.  The Corinthian experence shines a light on the intersections between church, state and duelling religions. This is far from being an irrelevant perspective, when we consider the intense passions of religious faith in the news today, in Afghanistan, the United States, Israel, the Arab republics and any nation where a religion has its fingers on the levers of state.

The maxims of religion are not commonsense in the Corinthian experience or anywhere else

It is rather dangerous to think that there is no science to what religions sell. Judaism descended into divisions among the priesthood, the academics and the political savvy. The twenty-frist century world is not exempt from this phenomenon. The experience seems to have begun with Paul’s encounter with the Greek philosophers in Athens (Act 17:22 ff) and chose to leave  being mocked by them (Act 17:32-34).  It was his teamwork with Aquila and Priscilla who have been recently deported from Rome and happened to be tentmakers, as was Paul, and who gave him room and board.

It seems that Paul did his tentmaking and preaching-teaching part-time until Silas and  Timothy joined him from Macedonia, at which time he devoted himself to the word of God, namely, that Yeshua was the Messiah. Paul was not preaching the law of God.  He evidently used it to do so.  

Matters heated up when the synagoue leader believed the message and was baptized, which in turn led to a host of Corinthians following his lead.  Then, in his precognition, the Lord encouraged Psul in a vision to “stop being fearful, and to keep on speaking, and not to be silent”.  One does not need to guess who would want Paul to be silent.

Paul taught the word of God for eighteen months and then the Jews, thinking they had an opportunity under the auspces of proconsul of Achaia Gallio, brought charges against Paul. We are going to see a slam dunk of the illegitimate hostility of Jews against Christ in the courts of Greece.  Other attempts to have Paul silenced will take place in the Roman court system, bringing Paul to his treasuresd destiny, the imperial household.

The charge

13) This man persuades men to worship God contrary to the law [of God/Moses].

Proceedings interrupted

14) But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrong or of vicious crime, O Jews, it would be reasonable for me to put up with you;” (Act 18:14, NASB)

It ought to be difficult to bring charges of crime and sedition againts believers, but it seems that people have become incregasingly attracted to political constructs for church’s progress and success.  The people who are willing to foment and perpetrate violence and murders can be found in the contexts of Jewish, African, Palestinian, Islamic, Buddhist, and American politics.

I raise again the flag of warning to people of genuine spirituality:  stay away from government interference in matters of your beliefs.  Mixing beliefs with political ideologies and law of any kind never ends well for those who do.  We cannot imagine that Iranians, Jews, and anyone with a book that is a tool for divine revelation is unaware that telling people what to believe under threat of death is pure beastliness and not worthy of association with humanity. Let us see how a synagogue responded to the court’s dismissal of a case against God’s messenger. 

If there was a crime here I would tolerate you

but if there are questions about words and names and your own [Jewish/Mosaic/Elohistic] law, look after it yourselves; I am unwilling to be a judge of these matters. 

Verse 15

Kicked out of court and mob violence

16) And he drove them away from the judgment seat. 17) And they all took hold of Sosthenes, the leader of the synagogue, and began beating him in front of the judgment seat. But Gallio was not concerned about any of these things. (Act 18:16-17, NASB)

And the government barely blinked.