[OBW]

ZNP,

Complain about my "one trick pony" reference if you will. But did you not see that it was about the direction of the thread and not just your posts? Yes, you did mention the other criteria. That was not disputed. It was the general discussion that was essentially skipping the whole thing.

But as you get older, you find that there are many times that you are put in positions where those in authority are younger than you. Yes, the very top positions are often among those who are close to retiring. But it in the trenches (such as in the local office of the national CPA firm) the partners and directors (non-equity at partner level) are upper 30s to mid 40s. I was probably 10 when the oldest one of them was born. And there are some aspects of managing people that they are not that good at. But among accountants, few are. Are the criteria for rising in the operations is not only managing people.

The elders at our church are all mid 40s into 60s. The one who has lead the group for much of the time has four grown, married children, the youngest being a couple of years older than my oldest. We started attending this place 23 years ago when our oldest was about 5. But at the time, there were few older than that man, then around 40. (It also is no small consideration that he is a seminary professor.)

And it is right to say that a wet-behind-the-ears kid is probably a poor choice. But when you see a home group that emerges into being a church, what do you have? Maybe nothing. It would be wise if such a group attached itself to another, larger group for the purpose of providing some of the needed help and maturity. Not saying to give up being the little assembly that it is, but by having the connections, there is a kind of sharing of resources. The two groups don't have to be absolutely on the "same page" to be of service to one another. I think that the original church in Columbus that is linked in with some community church is a pretty good example. They know that they are on different wavelengths on a few things, but seem OK with it.

And having let this sit for a while as I was writing off-and-on today, the most important thing in all that I have been concerned about is probably best summed up in this. While it is one thing to get into the faulty workings of the LRC for the purpose of exposing its hypocrisy, it seems that we too often turn to trying to pin down the operational side of "church" too much of the time rather than trying to pin down the my responsibility to Christ and to other Christians and to the world at large. And the biggest thing about my responsibility is about how I live. How I obey. How I pray. How I worship. How is my attitude. You probably get what I am saying. Instead, we finish saying what the LRC is doing wrong, then try to figure out how everybody else out to be doing it by our version of the yardstick.

The problem is that with the few we have engaged here, we don't agree on the yardstick. And some will be certain that they have it right. I freely admit that I do not know what is the way to do it. Overall, I'm fairly convinced that everything that we think we know so well should be opened up and completely reviewed. Not that I think that the result will be different, or not very different. But sometimes I realize that the fundamental core is the same, but what it really means is not what I thought. Hard to explain. But it does tend to cause external factors to fall away. Like the idea that ritual is simply bad. Or tradition. We were so ingrained against them simply because they existed. That is nonsense. The only problem with tradition or ritual is the heart of the participant. It is never simply bad because you can slap a label on it.

And when we get into the administration of the church, or more clearly, the assembly, we too often get very self-righteous about how we think it ought to be. How the "rules" are meant to be read and understood. And they may may ultimately be right. But worrying about how right we are in administering an assembly when our life has been so lopsided to the spiritual/inner-life and away from the practicality of living righteously now (and not after we get more dispensing or any other still-missing ingredient) somehow seems a little like letting ICU patients diagnose and treat themselves. Well, not quite so extreme. We need to be busy working on our lives and worrying less about everyone else's or trying to direct how churches decide who will do what. Are they perfect at that? Probably not.