Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Wednesday February 15, 2006

The world will be a better place when religious folk begin to practice what we preach. One of the many things we are supposed to hold dear is the truth as taught by Jesus is the reality that the church is bigger than the times, or any single person or group of people within the church. After all the church is deemed so important by the Lord that Christ Himself died for it.

The same attitude is to prevail in the auxiliary groups of the church, such as schools, mission societies and of colleges. In an ideal world each of the said groups would be directly controlled by a local congregation. Alas, all is not perfect in our current world. Nor are the people entrusted with operating said institutions. Yet the overarching principle of dying to self for the preservation of those ministries that fill in the gaps.

I have been in prayer with some friends and a few men that I do not personally know; the object of the prayer is to find a way to preserve a time honored ministry that has fallen on hard times. Many involved want to 'win' the current war, even at the expense of the demise of the once widely used work. Such is the shame.

I came across a story I have used in past years in helping local churches attempt to settle serious differences, differences so severe that the very life of the local church depended on a positive outcome. Revival can be and is often used in these situations. The same principles used in the denial of self and a surrendering to the will of God in preserving the ministry or even a marriage are well documented in the scripture.

At the end of the Civil War, you recall, The War of Northern Aggression, a meeting to discuss the future of The Southern Baptist Seminary was called. The times were tough, the classes had been suspended due to the war, the churches were weak, there was no money, and added to this bleak scene, many of the young men had died in the war.

Four members of the faculty met and prayed, this group constituting the entire faculty. After long prayer, Dr. John A. Broadus rose and said:

"Gentlemen, suppose we quietly agree that the seminary may die, but we'll die first."

In about any conflict involving the people religious if the people will get in the same room, and pray, and agree that the marriage is more important than the players, that the church is more important than the factions, that the mission of agency or school is more important than personal peeves or gain, and then more prayer and hopefully God will raise up some one, such as Dr. Broadus, to die to self and enter into the spirit of his above statement, the world will long stand in awe at the work that is wrought by the Lord God of heaven. It's interesting to me that in all of the conflicts I have had a part in helping to solve, each faction loses something and the work of Christ gains everything.

You may be right, but remember, no matter how flat a pancake is, it still has two sides.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2006 Use with credit.

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