Getting Up In Each Other’s Business!

Christian accountability is a touchy subject these days.  It is an especially touchy subject for me because I spent six and a half years of my life in a Christian Church that was, by all social standards, very unhealthy (bordering on “cultish”, if it wasn’t in fact a full-blown Christian cult).  Accountability in that church looked like life-control more than sin-elimination.

But sin-elimination is the point.  Our motives are extremely important and so are the results.  I think the means take a back-seat to the motives and the results.  Just take a look at Phil Jackson, the coach of the Lakers.  Here is a guy whose methods and means are quite unusual.  He had the Lakers visualizing themselves as frogs on lillypads before game 4 of the NBA Finals!  Those methods are not questioned but imitated, because he has gotten results.  10 NBA championships speak for themself.

Now let’s refocus on the idea of sin-elimination with another metaphor.  A friend of mine does not believe in spanking her child.  I understand that.  No one but a sicko enjoys the actual act of spanking a child.  However, I get pleasure in disciplining my sons for the sake of their character and moral development.  That is the hoped-for result.  The motive is love, plain and simple.  (I am not suggesting my friend does not love her children, don’t get me wrong.  I think we disagree on the eventual character of disciplined children who receive the “rod” and those who do not.)

Now to the main point.  John Wesley was God’s gift to His Church in that he established SMALL GROUP MINISTRY for the sake of developing disciples.  Most large and successful churches around the world employ small groups as a huge part of their church life and practice.  They are used for discipleship, Bible study, prayer, fellowship, and other essentials of Christian growth.  As he and George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards road the wave of the First Great Awakening, he understood that something would have to be done to receive and develop the huge numbers of Christian converts into mature Christian believers.  He established class, band, and society meetings–SMALL GROUPS.

At a class meeting, recent converts would be asked 5 penetrating questions:

1.  What known sins have you committed since our last meeting?

2.  What temptations have you met with?

3.  Were you delivered?

4.  What have you thought, said, or done which you question whether was sin or not?

5.  Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?

WOW!  Can you imagine the fidgeting and nervous laughter taking place at those meetings?  Some people today would call that an abusive invasion of privacy.  Would you?  I believe that Wesley’s motives were to see a HOLY, sinless group of people.  Did he achieve that?  By all accounts, YES!  The Methodist Church exploded in numbers and converts in Great Britain and the US and around the world.  The resulting piety of the British lower classes has been widely understood to have prevented a political revolution similar to the one that bloodied France in the late 1700’s.  Innumerable hospitals, churches, schools, and humanitarian agencies were spawned in the centuries following.  I could go on.

Anyway, could we handle that kind of strict accountability?  Should we call for that again?  Was that methodology for another age and culture?  I am not sure.  Whaddaya think?