A famous minister in Moscow often uses parables to illustrate and comment on the travails of certain folks in his congregation, and so it seems appropriate to use a parable to illustrate a phenomena I have observed under heaven.
There were two worshiping congregations. Both proclaimed Jesus as Lord and Savior, both packed the pews with sincere followers of the Gospel, and both had strong pastors who guided their flocks with weekly exhortations from the pulpit. The people enjoyed fellowship with one another, but the goodwill of the people spoken of in Acts 2 eluded them both; the people in their communities were wary and the two congregations tended not to seek community with others in their towns.
But they both claimed Christ Jesus as Savior, and both were known by the people, however wary those people were, as Christian congregations. That they were more “stand-alone” than other evangelical churches seemed to mean little to the congregants themselves, and the churches enjoyed regular growth over the years.
One of the churches stressed a formality of worship in the service, devoting themselves to the singing of the Psalms and emphasizing the importance of practiced excellence in four-part harmonies. Each adult congregant was assigned, by the tone and range of their singing voices, a part as bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, and the singing of these Psalms marked their worship and consumed their weekdays as they practiced the discipline of not only memorizing, but mastering the singing of the scores of Psalms required for their participation in Sunday worship. This congregation expected children to remain in the service with their parents, and the mothers, who were tasked with keeping the kids quiet, and the fathers, whose successful headship was measured by the propriety their families displayed, felt the stress — the dichotomous tug of keeping toddlers quiet while simultaneously hitting their notes and remembering their lines in worship.
The worship and preaching of this congregation fed the souls of its leadership, even if its congregants struggled at times to find nourishment in the ministry of the church. The church’s worship and preaching also resulted in some things that a few of the congregants struggled with, especially the newer ones, who were unaccustomed to hearing a minister gleefully mock sinners from the pulpit, pray harm on its perceived enemies, and assure his flock that God really did create some people for the sole purpose of damning them to hell for his good pleasure.
This theology, however difficult for the congregants, did make some sense. After all, if the minister made fun of homosexuals and liberals and women who sought equality with men, it must be — it had to be, according to his theology — that they and others were “reprobates,” marked for damnation and thus fair game for the shredding rhetoric of the pastor. It had to make sense. Even if it felt like a pebble in their shoe during their walk with the Lord.
The other congregation smelled bad. The church that rented them space on Saturday nights was old and musty; the pews had absorbed decades of Murphy’s oil soap, which mingled on those Saturday nights with the sweat, motor oil, cigarettes and road debris that clung to them. Theirs was a “biker” church, a congregation of former and current addicts, gang members, and poor people wearied by lives of degradation, deprivation, and desperation. The aroma that rose up from the hundred or so worshipers was pungent, and it was entirely pleasing to the God they praised.
The brothers and sisters in this church were not scholars — not Bible scholars or classical scholars or, in many cases, not even high school graduates. They read out of the New International Version or the New Living Bible, although some didn’t read well enough to have a preferred translation. Others knew what they knew from tracts and tapes and the abrasive, insistent preaching of their leather- and chains-bedecked pastor, a towering, hairy, somber man whose lunch could usually be identified by the specks and stains adorning his beard. His was a salvation message, plain and simple, and not because his congregants were plain and simple — they weren’t, and in fact their lives were often doggedly complex. They were marginalized by their own choices and by the society, even the church society, around them, and when the pastor told them they were lost without Jesus, they didn’t have any trouble believing him. Truly, most of them felt pretty lost even after Jesus, but they kept coming, kept believing, kept praying, and kept waking up every day determined to praise Jesus.
Their music was guitar-driven and heavy on old “camp songs,” simple choruses from the revivals of centuries past. They sang with gusto and volume and fervor, and occasionally even sang in tune with one another — no melody, no four- or five-parts, and harmony not of the tonal variety, but of the convivial. They swung from “Jesus On The Mainline” and “I’ll Fly Away” to “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art,” and “Amen”s and “Hallelujah”s and “Hell, yeah!” rang out liberally. Guys named Spider and Two-Bit hugged women named Pineapple and Boo, and T-shirts stretched tight over big bellies were often streaked with tears as the worshipers fell on their knees and cried out to the God who saved them, even after weekends not remembered but fully mourned and repented of on Monday.
Those lost weekends became fewer and further between as the women and men grew in Christ, and as they found him, they realized they had also found each other, and many of them, for the first time in their lives, came to understand “community” — the love, support, empathy, accountability and affection they hadn’t gotten growing up. And where the other church’s pastor preached the appropriateness of “covenant lying” to unbelievers, this one was rigorous in its insistence that honesty and truth, integrity and virtue, were indisputable, unchangeable characteristics of the Christian life.
You didn’t want to get caught here registering your 2007 Harley Fathead as a 2004 just to save a few bucks, and you could expect an immediate, pointed, loving rebuke from the pastor if he found out you did.
The first congregation was staunchly Calvinistic in orientation, seeing salvation through the corporate lens of the covenant, not the individual soul, and it hailed baptism, even that done in infancy, as the defining trait of the Christian. The biker church couldn’t have cared less if it were Arminian, Calvinist, or anything else; it preached salvation in Christ alone, through faith by grace, and the altar call disdained by the former was the primary means of entrance into the fellowship of the latter. Baptisms were frequent and joyous, but only for those who consciously, publicly confessed their faith in Jesus. It didn’t save them, but it was a necessary step of obedience, and no one at the biker church would’ve asserted that evangelizing their own children was useless, even offensive, because of their “covenant membership.” You weren’t a “grandchild” in Christ, the pastor warned — the faith of your parents was irrelevant to your own salvation, and so kids were treasured, welcomed, and evangelized by parents concerned for their salvation.
Both congregations grew. Both remained apart from the larger Christian Church culture around them — the former, because of the controversial utterances and writings of the pastor, whose embrace of slavery and the Confederacy and condemnation of democracy and equality made him repugnant to other churchgoers; the latter, because of the unkempt, rowdy nature of the congregants, which upset the more staid, conventional churches around them. But they continued doing, both of them, what God called them to do, believing that the Lord they served was pleased with their efforts borne of faith.
The biker church practiced, in its own way, a piety and evangelistic drive the other church’s leadership derided as “sentimental” and “feminine,” and its members were counseled to shun the alcohol, tobacco, and other things considered vices — not just because of the havoc those things had wreaked on their lives, but also because the biker church clung to a simple, historical view of “righteous living” utterly at odds with the freewheeling approach to drink, dance, and “Christian hedonism” promoted by the other. They would not have understood each other, nor grasped how the Lord could be pleased with both. Where one admonished its congregants that the Bible “commanded” that they enjoy wine, the other encouraged its followers to avoid it, and each was certain that Spirit-led righteousness was the motivator for its proclamations and counsel.
The Bible insists that the believer will be known by the Fruit of the Spirit demonstrated in their lives — their ministries, their engagement with unbelievers, their families and careers, and their witness of the Gospel — and the fruit each individual in both groups demonstrated was generally kind, generally decent, and generally fragrant to the Lord Jesus. But there were signs of rot, whiffs of decay, dogging one of them, and it was noticed by a few on the inside and many more on the outside. Still, its congregants struggled to accommodate the vitriol and mockery they heard from the pulpit and read in the ministers’ words, but they clung, ultimately, to their belief that “reprobates” deserved it, and they stifled their discomfort by telling themselves that they couldn’t, and shouldn’t try, to “out-love” the Savior who had consigned them to hell, even before birth, for his own good pleasure.
It didn’t, perhaps, pass their sainted Grandmothers’ “sniff test,” and it wore, at times, on their souls, but they continued. Some, of course, tried to leave, only to find their innermost struggles become fodder for their pastor’s parables and sermons. They couldn’t take their concerns to their elders, almost all of whom were dependent on the pastor’s ministries and business empire for their livings, and they had, if they were heads of households, signed an oath to not discuss the church’s problems or failings with others. People in the community sometimes called the church a cult, and it didn’t feel like one — but it didn’t feel like it should, and it become a lonely place for anyone who smelled the faint stirrings of rot and decay from within.
But it wasn’t, at least, the smell of poverty. It wasn’t the smell of unsophisticated brutes and painted women and people ignorant of the privileges of covenant membership and unaware of the finer points of classic education. And that was enough for more than a few of them, who worked out their salvation in fear and trembling, as much because of the pastor as the Lord Jesus. The emphasis on the covenant, on the corporate nature of their salvation, meant that the group and its strength was the foremost priority of its leadership, and they brooked no dissent because of the risk of appearing to “deny their baptism” in doing so. And so they stayed, and they thought wistfully of simpler, better, more gentle times, when they belonged to congregations that loved Jesus, revered his Word, and served in the Holy Spirit those around them who didn’t yet know.
The Father of Light, the Son made perfect in suffering, and the empowering gifts and presence of the Holy Spirit were in Heaven and all around them, and as the Trinity of God reigned from above, two very different fragrances wafted up from below. The LORD of the harvest would come again for his own, but he tarried, and the aromas brought forth by both churches continued, unmixed, unfailingly offered, and unaffected one by the other.
Two fragrances, two Fruits, two congregations. One LORD. And may he judge rightly between the two, for the sake of his name and the sake of those perishing without it. Some of whom, sadly, were perishing inside the walls of congregations that bore his name, choking and floundering amidst the chorus of praise gamely offered by those looking out and wondering about the times they truly cared about those looking in.