|
 From
Isaac Errett (Evenings With The Bible, Vol. 3, p. 363-f) comes
some interesting thoughts. We insert some questions, pending
application, but feel the whole is worth quoting.
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"The
(primitive) church was full of ministries. There were rulers,
teachers, preachers, exhorters, singers, ministers of mercy,
missionaries and helpers who served an apprenticeship in this or
that department of service until they were fully trained for
their work. Men and women, old and young, had a work to do. They
were not all preachers or teachers, but they were all workers,
in some department of church life, under the direction of rulers
whose business it was to see that while there was free play for
all the gifts and energies of the entire membership, everything
should still be done "decently and in order." The fact
that our gifts are natural and not supernatural does not alter
this phase of church life. There is still an equal variety of
gifts, and still an equal need for their exercise, and the
"increase of the body" should still be the result of
"the effectual working in the measure of every part."
In
no one feature of the primitive church are we so lacking as in
this; and in no particular are we so prone to extremes. Either
the preacher is made the packhorse for the church, and every
burden is laid upon him; or the preacher is discarded, and the
general clatter of the tongues of the membership is supposed to
realize the apostolic idea of church edification. These are both
ruinous extremes. We need
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preachers, teachers, and rulers, and in
every church of considerable size at least one (? rt) who gives
his whole time to this work; nor can the churches succeed
permanently without some such arrangement. But we need such men,
not to take the work off the hands of the members, but to call
them into the work, train them for it, and lead them in it. In
no other way can the church life of the primitive disciples be
reproduced.
There
was little of what we call authority asserted in the churches of
the first age. The rule was patriarchal. Indeed, the family idea
of the patriarchal age was reproduced, only in an enlarged form
and on a spiritual basis. The national religion of the Jews,
which intervened for special purposes for a time, was taken out
of the way, and the original family idea was restored. The
rulers and guides were fathers and mothers, and the government
was parental.
There
was very little governmental machinery — nothing of the
"red-tape" precision and formality which is now deemed
the perfection of ecclesiastical order. Bound by love, and in
love serving one another, the younger submitting to the elder,
and all being subject to one another, they adopted such measures
for mutual welfare or for carrying out their benevolent
purposes, as the emergency demanded; and in spite of all the
uproar sought to be made over the use of the word, it is
nevertheless true that in all that pertained to ways and means
in accomplishing their work, their plans were exceedingly
"flexible," and had to be so." (Statement subject
to abuse; rt.)
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