I was out most of the day at appointments and then I was pretty tired when I got home (and still am tired). I have a lot to do around home too, since I've been so focused on this blog. But I have started getting things set up for summing up discussions of text that pertain to Vienna and a brief summary of the issues I've identified so far. I haven't started on preparing for the chronology discussion yet though. I hope to get more headway done on these things tomorrow; I don't have any appointments tomorrow.
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I don't want to keep posting just for the sake of posting something, but on the other hand, I would also like to minimize breaks as much as possible. So I thought of an issue that I might be up to and that also would be both timely and hopefully also helpful. I'm going to discuss Revelations 2 and 3. (To go to Revelation 3 click on the right arrows after the "Revelation 2" that is right above "New International Version.")
When a person becomes a Christian s/he, among other things, joins the Church, the Body of Christ. I've already in this blog discussed a little about how Christians are supposed to interact, but for my purposes here I just want to focus on a couple of issues. First of all, the new believer needs to be around other believers and grow in his/her faith through interaction with them, including teaching, for example. The new believer would probably also learn by example and would become like the other Christians in his/her local congregation, right? Nowadays, of course there are a lot of other inputs, whether through mass media or interactive electronic media, or conferences of all types, etc. So the influence of a single church might not be as strong as if there weren't all these other inputs, let alone the veritable plethora of churches to choose from making it easy for the believer to change churches if he/she so desires. But things were a lot different in New Testament times, and I think the local church would have had more of a monopoly of influence on the young believer, barring, of course, visiting itinerant preachers or letters to churches from apostles and the like.
So from this background, I would like you to imagine that a young believer is led to Christ by a member of the Church at Ephesus (Rev. 2:1 to 7) hasn't been saved, say a year or so (enough to develop some grounding in the faith but not necessarily be a very strong Christian), and something happens in her life and she has to move to, say, Thyatira (Rev. 2:18-27), and once there joins up with that local church. What do you think it might be like for that believer? What would her response be to the differences between the churches?
Let's say she finds out where the church meets and starts attending. Don't you think it might be confusing to her to see the differences between the church she knew before and this new one? She might know enough about Scriptural teaching to be able to bring this up with someone there, but if she's the only one that is having a problem at the church, what are her choices at that point? She could leave the faith entirely, of course, maybe out of disillusionment, for example. Or she could go on a crusade in the nature of new believer zeal. But she might not be able to withstand the others, which wouldn't be surprising because the Bible does warn against making immature believers leaders too soon. So she might be right but not have enough grounding to hold her own.
On the other hand, what would it be like if a new believer from the church in Pergamum (Rev. 2:12-17) moved to the church in Philadelphia? Would the new believer maybe feel like he needed a second conversion in the new climate of stronger spirituality?
Then what would it be like if a stronger believer moved from one of these churches to another?
Considering the local church, a move from any one of these 7 churches in Rev. 2 & 3 to another one of these churches would require a change for the person to fit in at the new church. But is using the local church as the criteria upon which to base one's Christian life a sound one? How much should the individual rely on the local church to be a sound interpretation of God's plan for the Christian (and the Church)?
The other issue is the local culture. If you read the descriptions of the churches, you will see that some of these churches (e.g., Pergamum) were too influenced by the local culture. Other churches just seemed to drift away from God (not particularly to anything else; cp, Sardis, Rev. 3:1-6).
So if a church drifts away from God and/or to something else, this raises a dilemma for the individual believer. Either she will follow the church and enjoy the fellowship with the other believers (while her relationship with God might suffer), or she decides to reject the errors she sees in the church (based on Scriptural teaching) and risk this decision affecting her relationship with the local church (but her relationship with God might be strengthened). If she were in a position of authority she might be more likely to wield influence in the church for change for the good, or she could also leave the church, of course.
You might be wondering why I'm bringing up this subject, although some of you may well have figured it out already. I was an individual going to a new church, of sorts, namely the Vienna mission. I do think my church background was pretty good and also my Bible school exemplars (the professors) all influenced my Christian growth immensely. I must say I didn't see a great difference between my home church and the Bible school instructors, although there might have been somewhat more zeal in the latter. But the Vienna mission, I think, might not exactly resemble any one of these 7 churches in Revelation, but I am very confident in my belief that they were affected too much by worldly influences. I'm referring here to the ideological and values aspects of the work that allowed them to make compromises contrary to biblical teaching for the sake of "security."
I don't know what kinds of churches the other missionaries came from, and I can't speak for them. I've discussed other contributing issues in this blog that might also have impacted one's decision to go along with the Vienna mission or not, so I won't repeat them here. But I think the church background, or the concept of "church" one had somehow developed along the way, may well have been another factor in determining whether one could or would fit into the Vienna mission.
I chose to be a black sheep in Vienna, I think at least partly because I had a different idea of what the Church is supposed to be like.
