Dear Ray,
We can leave denominations, gather in a living room, dismiss every title, and still carry the old arrangement into the house.
There is no pastor. No pulpit. No one delivers a sermon. We call one another brothers and sisters.
Yet five talented ones gradually become the functioning center of everything.
By “five talented ones,” I mean a handful of capable members who come to dominate a gathering; the concern is the pattern, whatever their number.
One always has the explanation. Another directs the conversation. Another knows what everyone needs. Their abilities fill the available space until the gathering begins to depend on them. Everyone is free to participate, supposedly, but the life of the gathering has already acquired its familiar channels.
We have removed the titles without removing the distinction.
Some supply. The others receive.
My concern is not that these brothers and sisters have abilities. It is that their abilities have become an occupation, an identity, and eventually an authority within the gathering. They begin to understand themselves as the ones through whom something must happen.
That understanding draws them out of abiding.
They feel responsible for the silence. Responsible for the direction. Responsible for whether the gathering accomplishes anything. Before anyone asks them to act, they are already preparing to fill the space.
And the rest of the body learns to leave that space to them.
This is how something apparently helpful can grow like a tumor within a living organism. I am speaking of the pattern, not calling the people tumors. One part becomes disproportionately active, occupies the room, and interferes with the functioning of the whole.
The tragedy is that we may celebrate this as the flourishing of gifts.
But a body in which five talented ones become increasingly necessary while everyone else becomes increasingly dependent is being injured. Their prominence is no proof that Christ is growing in the members.
What about the quiet brother whose few uncertain words never survive the arrival of a polished explanation? What about the sister who has begun to speak but finds her thought completed by someone more articulate? What happens to their functioning when someone else is always ready?
They learn to defer.
The talented ones learn to continue.
Neither movement should be confused with the growth of divine life.
And the injury reaches those five talented ones as surely as everyone else. They become captive to their usefulness. They find it difficult to sit among the others without contributing something recognizable. Their sense of who they are becomes entangled with what they provide.
They came as members. They have become indispensable people.
I do not believe this is God’s intention for His body.
Yes, Scripture speaks of gifts. But a gift does not create a higher kind of member or confer ownership of the body’s expression. Our identity is our membership in Christ and in one another. When “gifted” becomes the defining word, we have already begun separating what belongs together.
Nor can a gift supply an independent source of life. The most capable person remains utterly dependent on Christ. Ability can continue operating after its possessor has been drawn out of abiding. That is precisely what makes it dangerous to mistake fluent functioning for Zoe.
We speak of this pattern as sapping Zoe. More precisely, it exhausts the members and crowds out their living by Zoe. Christ’s life is not diminished; its expression among us is obstructed by our habitual occupation of the ground.
I want those five talented ones released as much as everyone else.
Released from having to make something happen. Released from being the answer. Free to be ordinary members whose life is Christ.
A living room does not guarantee a living body.
We must relinquish the inward arrangement that makes some the providers and others their audience. Otherwise, we have brought the very thing we left directly into our home.
With affection,
Brent
