I still remember the church service where my dad got into a fight.
Okay, he only kind of got into a fight. It was a business meeting and dad had mentioned an idea he had for a ministry opportunity. Now dad didn’t know that his idea involved messing with a sacred cow that one of the other men of the church had. And this man was wealthier. He’d been going to that church for years, and so when he said no everybody listened.
I found out later that this was called church politics.
And I didn’t like it.
In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine became a Christian. I say he became a Christian loosely, no one really knows if his conversion was sincere or for expedience to unify his struggling Roman empire.* And while there’s no shortage of material dedicated to his conversion, I’d like to talk about something else. I want to talk about what happened afterward.
It all started with a lady named Lucilla. She was a wealthy, devoted Christian, who had a strange habit of kissing the bone of a martyr before communion…like you do. Because nothing helps you focus like kissing a skeleton. And she did this every week, until her acting bishop asked her to stop. She refused, and so he kicked her out.
I know it already sounds like a soap opera, but trust me it gets worse.
Two other guys now enter the picture. They had wanted to get the bishop job at Lucilla’s old church and now they suddenly saw this as an opportunity to weasel their way in.
They fought it out for a while, until finally one of them was appointed to be a rival bishop. Some people took the side of the first bishop, others took the side of the second. Everyone was calling everyone else a heretic, the Emperor Constantine got involved, and eventually there was a schism, or church split.
The burning issue of the day was, “Are you pro or anti-skeleton kissing?”
I think history is easier to talk about for one reason. We tend not to care about the issues that they cared about quite as deeply. Nobody’s splitting a church over this communion practice today, but the implications of history…that’s where things get dicey.
Reading through the first few hundred years of church history we didn’t used to act like this.
Sure we had disagreements, and sometimes sharp ones. People tried to coerce, use influence, and sometimes even were ugly. But as a church we rarely gave into this kind of soap opera before this. We were smaller, on the margins, localized.
But now we were something else.
It was becoming hard to keep up with who was mad at who, and what nefarious ways they were going about trying to exact revenge on those who had slighted them.
It felt, in a word, like politics.
Perhaps already the church is seeing the fruit of some seeds it had inadvertently planted.
We began to privilege the very people that the world did. The wealthy and powerful were no longer on equal footing with those on the margins of society. We had lost Paul’s desire of church as a community of people “no longer regarding anyone from a worldly point of view.”
In getting comfortable with the systems that the world used to govern itself, we changed into something much different than the close knit band of self-less people we started off as.
But at least ministers get a tax break.
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