Gang,
What follows is oversimplified, and to do the issue justice, warrants a book-length treatment.
Please understand, I don't side with the group I call cynics. Cynicism doesn't issue from love.
But, what they believe in has the deepest possible roots in the Church of God. It's not going away. At least, it hasn't yet.
And, if peace is not made, considering the degree the CGGC has declined, it could be fatal to the body.
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I've been making the point lately that a fairly large portion of the CGGC is cynical about any and everything denominational and conference leaders do, that those people don't ever follow leadership when it attempts to lead and that, as the CGGC's decline continues, that cynicism has become a genuine and serious threat to the continued existence of the denomination.
The off the blog reaction I'm receiving to those thoughts suggests to me that people, across the ERC at least, take those observations as a given...that what I say about the cynics and cynicism in the ERC is accurate.
I have a theory to explain who the cynics are and how they came to be.
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Before I describe my theory regarding the pastors and churches who defiantly ignore leadership's attempts to lead, though, I will note that cynicism in the CGGC is everywhere and it points in every direction.
I used to hang around the mountaintops of the CGGC and the ERC. As much as I love the individuals on the mountaintops, I know that many of the people in CGGC leadership are everybit as disrespectful and disdainful of the people I'm calling cynics as the cynics are of the hierarchs.
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The beliefs and passions of the cynics of the CGGC, and particularly of the cynics of the ERC, trace back to one important element of the core teachings and practices of John Winebrenner and the men and women who joined him in ministry in the first generation of the Church of God when the Church of God was a dynamic, Spirit-empowered movement.
IN THIS RESPECT, IT IS ACTUALLY THE CYNICS IN THE CGGC WHO CARRY A KEY MARKER OF THE DNA OF WINEBRENNER AND THE FOUNDERS OF OUR ONCE THRIVING MOVEMENT.
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Key to what Winebrenner believed, taught and did can be thought of as Christian Populism.
And, the people in the CGGC/ERC who today consistently and passionately, AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE, ignore leadership and refuse to follow leaders when they attempt to lead are Christian Populists.
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Winebrenner founded the Church of God on the conviction that authority and power in the church comes solely from the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
He believed that the certainly is human authority in the church...
...but, Winebrenner believed that the Spirit leads through the will of the body...
...so long as the people in the body are living in the power of the Spirit.
This is a form of populism because Winebrenner believed that the Spirit expresses Himself and that the Spirit leads the church through popular opinion...
...through the will of the people of the church...
...that is, through what Winebrenner called the Eldership.
The Church of God movement was formed on the conviction that, humanly speaking, there is wisdom and power available to the church...
...but, Winebrenner believed, the Spirit doesn't lead through leaders who make up an institutional hierarchy.
Winebrenner and his colleagues absolutely believed that the Spirit makes Himself and His will known through the consensus of the most common disciples of Jesus Christ.
More than that...and this is critical to understanding cynicism in the CGGC/ERC in 2017...
...Winebrenner and his colleagues had disdain for...they disrespected...hierarchy in the institutionalized church in other denominations.
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In the movement days, the people of the Church of God...
...HATED...
...the very idea that a Pope or a Bishop or a leader with any title could presume to lead the church body.
Because, as a core conviction, they believed that, humanly speaking, authority and power exists in the church in the wisdom and will of common sinners who have been converted into followers of Jesus.
And that belief about authority in the church lingers in the Church of God to this day.
Winebrenner and his colleagues in ministry planted that core belief into the DNA of the Church of God.
That belief is alive and well and passionately held in the CGGC and ERC among many even in 2017.
Many people in the CGGC today still believe that, humanly speaking, authority and power exists in the church in the wisdom and will of common believers.
They have an instinctual distrust of people with too much (theological) education and, particularly, people with denominational titles.
As such, they...
...HATE...
...the idea that people who are a part of an institutional hierarchy would presume to strategically plan how the most common of disciples of Jesus Christ should live.
Now, understand...
...some, perhaps many, of those people have never even heard of John Winebrenner.
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I won't say that I understand how it is that values that were the core of what Winebrenner and the first people of the Church of God embraced...
...what they loved...and what they despised...
...still enliven many in the CGGC.
But, I'm aware enough...and honest enough...to see that they do.
What stuns me is that what those first Church of God people embraced fills the hearts of...and defines the instinct of...the people in the CGGC who are cynical about what the CGGC hierarchs believe and do.
As people sharing a central element of the belief and passion of John Winebrenner and the men and women who joined him in ministry...
...Kevin, Dave, even Lance...
...many people in the CGGC don't respect you and even have disdain for you but not for you personally but because of what you represent to them.
You stand for the overthrow of the authority of the Spirit in the CGGC.
And, that, as you can imagine, makes them cynical about anything and everything you try to do when you present yourselves, not as common believers and servants, but as leaders of the church.
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As a student of Church of God history, that is my theory on why some people always resist why CGGC hierarchs do.
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