In the house church or simple church movement, we often hear that full-time “church workers” are unnecessary, or far less necessary than in the “established” church. How true is this? And how much of this opinion is born from frustration, dissatisfaction, envy or arrogance? Frustration and dissatisfaction because we recognise the discrepancy between the church we see in Acts and our current experience; envy, because we’d like to be in full-time ministry ourselves, but see no opportunity; arrogance because again, we see the discrepancy, and blame the visible representatives of the existing system, rejecting both them and the workings of that system. However, we all see that some things require full-time work, or are significantly more efficient if we can focus our attention on them full time. Raising children is one example: either we do it full-time ourselves, home-schooling our children, or delegate a significant part of it to paid teachers.
In the simple church movement, we have to consider how to best organise ourselves so that the entire Body of Christ grows to maturity. Ephesians 4 tells us that God has given particular gifts in order that this happen. The question, of course, is how the bearers of those gifts are organised. Some of them may be called to “full-time ministry” for the good of the Body; others may be called to employ their gifts part-time. Perhaps the “error” of traditional church structures is the institutionalisation, putting particular people in particular positions for the long term. That tends to concentrate all tasks on that one person, or small group of people, because as the need in the area of their gifting decreases, they tend to assume responsibility in other areas. Most people tend to delegate as much work as they can (a synonym for “are lazy”), so if there is a full-time pastor, for example, who can do the preaching, counselling, teaching or evangelising, the other Christians can lay back a little, relax after work, watch a little more television, or whatever.
Perhaps, instead of criticising the traditional church structures and particularly the people in them, we should repent of our past laziness. If we have already done that, either explicitly through confession or implicitly by changing our actions, wonderful. (I suspect that those who have done so are also discovering that it takes time and effort, and requires sacrifice and reordering of priorities.) As Jesus said, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Let’s not be hypocrites, but remove the plank from our own eyes first.
(Of course, there are also people who tell us that we shouldn’t be evangelising, counselling, teaching and so on. If we’ve listened to them instead of the Spirit sending us, we need to repent of that instead. Is it right to obey man, or God?)