Systematic

I’ve never been sure whether the skills of my friend the Systems Consultant are with administrative or computer systems.  He certainly demonstrates great facility with computers, whatever his professional engagement.  For my part, I’ve always found great satisfaction in seeing either sort of system fulfil its intended purposes smoothly and efficiently just the way it was designed.

The life of mankind is a system.  Created in purity and perfection as we read in Genesis, the system has been marred, biffed and battered down the centuries as man has exercised the freedom God provided, but it’s still a functioning system for all that.  The same is true of our individual lives: born, for the most part, in wholeness, but as the years pass, sickness or injury can take their toll on our physical efficiency, as also abuse or mental illness can impair our emotional systems.

God’s church is a system, too.  It was designed to be His body on earth, to spread the Gospel, the good news of God’s love for all mankind, and His provision for our redemption.  In that remarkable book that ends our Bible, the Revelation to John, we can find letters to seven early churches.  Though broadly similar in structure, each letter is tailored to the particular needs of the church to which it is addressed, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in God’s service.  As we read these letters (Rev. 2:1-3:22), it is worth comparing the characteristics of those early churches to our own.

There are many parallels between the church of the first century and that of the twenty-first.  From time to time we find ourselves fighting opposition from authorities or from the community around us.  We have to test the validity of religious leaders who may be misguided in their revolutionary ideas, or may in fact be wisely challenging our own ill-founded practices.  We can see, for example, that the people of Sardis were only going through the motions of being church.  Beneath the surface they were really half asleep (Rev. 3:1-2): their system was in ‘idle mode’.  Or look at the Laodiceans, whose riches made them blind to their real needs.  Their church system was like an engine with too much lubrication: it was clogged up and, try as it might, it couldn’t run properly.

The church, though, is composed of individuals.  We can blame ‘the system’, and it’s all too easy for us to claim that any inefficiency is down to others or the fault of someone else in particular.  We have to remember, though, that we are all cogs in the same engine.  As individuals within the body of the church, we have responsibilities to each other and to the whole (Rom. 12:5).  We are part of the system: it cannot function as perfectly without us as it can with us.  Let’s pray for guidance in the use of those gifts with which we have been blessed for the good of the whole (I Peter 4:10).