We must stop the turf wars.
They call it, in the marketing business, positioning. The goal is to place your product, in the mind of the consumer, in a particular category. The goal is to have your product carry with it any number of positive associations, and to distinguish your product from all the other competitors. Chevrolet positioned itself, once upon a time, as a product from the heartland. Buying a Chevy carried with it connotations of patriotism, stability, and tradition. Their jingle sang, “Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet…”
Since the church began seeking the wisdom of Madison Avenue in the past several decades, we have seen much the same strategy at work. New churches decide to name themselves, “River Oaks Worship Center” because of what the name evoked in the mind of the consumer. Never mind that the absence of a river, of oaks, or worship, and of a center. What mattered was positioning. River Oaks Worship Center said everything good- suburban, friendly, upscale without being snooty, ad nauseum.
Once we started looking at our neighbors as a market to be won, it wasn’t long that we began to see other churches as competitors for market share. Once we adopted a business model for the church, we started looking for strategies to bury the competition. We began to look at our brothers with suspicion, and giving them cause to suspect us. Cooperation went out the window.
The Scripture does not, however, describe the church as a business. A bride yes, a business, no. A body, yes, a business, no. Indeed the apostle Paul, in describing the body that is the church, reminds us of our temptation toward competition:
For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member but many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. And if they were all one member, where would the body be? But now indeed there are many members, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”; nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” No, much rather, those members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary (: 12-22).
This, of course, does not merely refer to a local congregation. It speaks also of the universal church. Our calling, for all our differences, is cooperation. Our calling is love for the brotherhood. Indeed, far better than any evangelistic program, far more potent than any apologetical argument, is the power of our love one for another. Jesus told us that by this will all men know that we are His disciples, by our love one for another.
No one can argue with this. No one would argue that cooperation in the church is a bad thing. Neither, however, can anyone deny that we are failing miserably here. We will not get better until we not only remember that we are a body, but remember that we are His body.
