church

I just ran across a great article at “Free the Church” detailing the organic nature of pastors and making a case that the gifts mentioned in Ephesians 4 are temporary in the Body. I never thought about them being temporary before and will have to mull that over. I’ll bet if you think about who the organic pastors in your own life have been, they will mostly have not been the man behind the pulpit, though.

I loved reading about the men who pastored this writer. Most of my organic pastors didn’t walk as long with me, but maybe there were quite a few if I think back on it. I’m going to take a stab at naming a few who pastored me. Here goes.

The Wife of a Former Pastor

The wife of a former pastor in an I/C was my real pastor for a moment in time. Shortly before, she had been at the center of a sex scandal with both a woman and a man, which split the church. The humiliating experience she’d been through, trotted about as a show-pony in a public confession for other people’s revenge, probably made her a better minister to distraught people.

A friend who was privvy to something that happened to me one night suggested I talk with this lady. So she called her up for me, and I ended up meeting this lady in a prayer room. She listened as I poured out my story and handed me tissues. She prayed a simple prayer for me and my respect for her shot way up because of her honesty and sense of compassion. She didn’t try to fix me or give me “12 Steps to a Successful Life”. Later, she was the only one who stood with me as my life crumbled. For that I will always see her as a woman of great dignity.

In contrast, one of my former friends offered herself as a minister to my difficulties on a prior occasion. She ended up telling me I had a rotten attitude and to “Shut up!” The message was, “Spiritual people don’t have problems. And if they do, they certainly don’t express them.” After that, I locked myself away in my heart.

In recounting this I realize some things about my walk now. My former friend probably did me a favor in a roundabout way. She made me start to realize there was no help in the I/C, but I didn’t realize the full import of that until several years later. I only understood that my efforts to know and serve God didn’t pay off as they had for others. What could I deduce except that either God had not blessed me or He didn’t love me as He did others? It took a long time to work that out.

People would be very surprised to hear of it now, as the world has changed and the law and I/Cs are on the side of my issue now. But at the time, they weren’t. It was open season on women. Still, I suppose that I learned not to depend on man-made institutions for justice. I get my justice and self-esteem from a higher source.

A Neighbor, Mary

She was a neighbor who saw me sitting on some steps outside my apartment. My life had already gone to hell in a handbasket and my three-year-old son’s life hung in the balance. She sat with me — OMG, a Roman Catholic and a Mexican-American one (the worst kind!). I found out that she had a living faith even though her non-evangelical lifestyle puzzled me a bit. (Roman Catholics play Bingo and drink beer, you know…) I don’t even remember what she said now. I came to believe in her friendship more than I believed in the “ministries” in the I/C after that incident with the former friend. Mary taught Catechism classes and lent me a book on the Catechism. I decided we weren’t too far apart after all. We became friends in the faith. For that one moment in my dark world, she was an organic pastor who kept me from melting away.

Sister H.

Sister H. was a lady in a Wednesday night home group in a local church I attended. She maintained the group’s prayer list. She listed the dates of the prayers and when they were answered. She told me once that they had never had a prayer that God didn’t answer. I was struck most by her honesty when she realized what my issues were. “We really don’t have an answer for you,” she told me, “but we know the One who does.” She is one of the shining faces of my past who didn’t scold me or try to fix me. I was rejected by would-be “ministers” at one church and later at this one, too. Sister H., however, met me in a hallway at church once and said, “You are awfully young to be going through all this. The Lord has something very special for you.” I will never forget the intensity of her eyes when she said this. She gave me hope and taught me to believe for what I couldn’t see and didn’t understand.

My Uncle

Now here was an intense personality and he walked longer with me than any other. We might have been enemies under other circumstances, he being a bit overbearing. But he helped me search out God’s path on numerous occasions and helped me learn to discern what was back of many things. He took my family in on two occasions and helped me get a better perspective on the world so that I learned to stand up to it. Because of him, I am a tougher woman.

Lastly and maybe most importantly:

My Mother

I don’t think of my mother as a pastor in the same way as people who floated in and out of my life, but I think she was an organic pastor in that she cared for my soul. By the time she died, we were poles apart in some of our personal doctrines, but she always made sure I was aware that what I did and became mattered to God. She set me on a right course when I was young and made sure I knew I had to consciously choose between Life and Death.

My organic pastors seem mostly to have dotted the landscape of my life and disappeared like a mist. I don’t know why. Few of these people walked for any length of time through the real issues of my life. I’m somewhat astounded to think that most of my “pastoring” has come through a word here and a word there. Mostly I have walked through places where everything was against me, so I’m rather surprised thinking back on it all that I’m still standing. I must conclude that there really is only one permanent Shepherd and Bishop of our souls after all. Wonder what other people’s experiences have been?

Following my reading of The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I feel compelled to make the case briefly that the Christian faith is not a “white man’s religion”, as has often been charged. It was birthed in the Middle East and not in Europe. Before the spread of the Christian faith into the West, its strength of paganism rivaled that in the East.

In many places this paganism survived alongside of or syncretistically with the Christian religion. Yet it seems that one of the peculiar aspects of Christianity in Europe and Asia is the difficulty of naming a truly indigenous church. Surely there must have been regional or tribal aspects of community worship in the early days, but nothing much survived after officialdom but a normed church culture. Worship in many places became a contrivance that carried little relevance in daily life for many.

If I have bashed the councils following Nicea, there is one good thing we may say of it. While the marriage of church and state had a corrupting influence on both, that first council called by Constantine left us a summation of what the churches had always believed up to that point. The council did not create new beliefs; it merely strained out what had been believed for over 300 years. When Paul told Timothy not to forget the traditions he had learned, it seems doubtful that he referred to a set of rituals. Rituals are culture dependent. More likely, Paul referred to the fundamentals of the common faith. I believe the Nicene Creed spelled out these fundamentals and it went something, more or less, like this:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.

From my point of view, that was the last important thing any council ever did, as later councils engaged in little other than hair-splitting debates over matters that God never invited us to peer into. The Nicene Creed sums up the gospel for all time, albeit in a freeze-dried state. For many, these became memorized words, but as God does now and again, He waters those words so that they come alive to those who seek.

The indigenous churches thereafter were mostly suppressed into a sameness of ritual and custom that served the purposes of the state. Occasionally, God has burst through the cold concrete of the imperial layers to reach His people. I believe He did this in Francis of Assisi and in Bernard of Clairvaux and probably in many others whose names have been lost to us but whose influence remains.

Consider the irony that today there is a push underway to grant Native Americans and other non-European types the freedom to establish their own indigenous churches. I find it ironic, considering that the European diaspora sent missionaries to so many tribal people, yet had no indigenous church of its own. Indeed, it did not know that it was even missing such. The closest we come to a legitimate native European church community is that of the Celtic church in the far West Isles before the influence of Constantine.

For my next grand experiment, I hope to examine ways and means of taking the church back for the people it was intended for. The difficulty is that culture does not stand still and, though I stand perfectly in the way to exhume the Celtic community flavor, I find myself at a loss. I cannot represent the Celtic community as it was, for I am a member of the Celtic diaspora to the New World — not the world that was and having no contact with the lands my people came from. Fortunately, my generation was the last who were taught anything of the stories, song and dance of our people at large and so I bring a vicarious memory that stretches beyond the manufactured culture of the television.

Because my background is blended from having been in the New World long enough to be mingled with people of other lands, my interpretation of the ancient church cannot be a pure product of one heritage. To top it off, I live in a region where my culture has been shaped by the proximity of Mexico and the addition of a Germanic heritage. But, a truly indigenous church should be able to shift with such changes so that the members of its worship community feel at home in their skin while still being able to accommodate those unlike themselves.

While we are on the topic, I thought I would throw in a video I found the other day about the up-and-coming churches of the Native Americans. It has great implications for the rest of us. Here are people who still operate according to the family rather than nationalism. Some of their practices and symbols might shock us, but I realized this may be little different than our Celtic crosses or the Coptic ankhs which were originally pagan symbols. There is nothing inherently “Christian” in concepts of eternity, judgment, righteousness and other universal ideas. The meanings still hold. Please have a look here and enjoy stretching your understanding of how God communicates in and through native thought.

Continuing on with The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I open with a quote from a section on Eusebius, the early church historian, to explain the atmosphere of the church that has continued since Constantine down to the present day to impact the culture of worship.

Three examples should suffice to illustrate the manner in which theology was being accommodated to fit the new situation. First of all, it is clear that in the New Testament as well as in the early church, it was affirmed that the Gospel was first of all good news to the poor, and that the rich had particular difficulty in hearing it and receiving it. … But now, beginning with Constantine, riches and pomp came to be seen as signs of divine favor. … But Eusebius — and the thousands of others for whom he probably spoke — does not seem to have been aware of the radical change that was taking place as the persecuted church became the church of the powerful, nor of the dangers involved in that change.

Likewise, Eusebius described with great joy and pride the ornate churches that were being built. But the net result of those buildings, and of the liturgy that evolved to fit them, was the development of a clerical aristocracy, similar to the imperial aristocracy, and often as far from the common people as were the great officers of the Empire. …

Finally, the scheme of history that Eusebius developed led him to set aside a fundamental theme of early Christian preaching: the coming Kingdom of God. … Since the time of Constantine, and due in part to the work of Eusebius … , there was a tendency to set aside or to postpone the hope of the early church, that its Lord would return in the clouds to establish a Kingdom of peace and justice. At later times, many groups that rekindled that hope were branded as heretics and subversives, and condemned as such. [125]

It was during such times that the emissaries to the Western church are thought to have reached the Western Isles, but it was not the Constantinian representatives who arrived first but descendants of the Desert Monks of Egypt. (If truth be told, legends abound that the Apostles or their representatives reached the West in the first century, so it is quite possible that some sort of indigenous church already existed in part of the West by the time the later emissaries traveled from Egypt.) Gonzalez explains the thrust counter to Constantine at this time:

…When the church joins the powers of the world, when luxury and ostentation take hold of Christian altars, when the whole of society is intent on turning the narrow path into a wide avenue, how is one to resist the enormous temptations of the times? …

Many found an answer in the monastic life: to flee from human society, to leave everything behind,to dominate the body and its passions, which give way to temptations. Thus, at the very time when churches in large cities were flooded by thousands demanding baptism, there was a veritable exodus of other thousands who sought beatitude in solitude. [136-137]

Certainly monasticism and the church system traveled together across Europe and eventually met up with the far West, but prior to that were groups of monastics in the Western Isles completely untouched by the changes since Constantine, such that when they met up, they were quite different. Even today’s Coptic Orthodox Church which claims some parenthood to the far Celtic church, bears the stamp of contamination of the times. It surely is not the same as that from which sprang the original apostles to the Isles.

In truth, the approach chosen for converting the barbaric Celts was as ridiculously simple as in the first century. The New Testament indicates that the original disciples did not continue only in pairs just because Jesus sent the first group out in twos. Reading the accounts of the apostles where this and that one consulted each other before going out gives that impression. But other names are also mentioned as being part of an entourage. We know that later groups involving men and women also went all over. And where were the children? There must also have been children. This missionizing would have turned into a family affair at some point. The early British church was begun by monastics, but the monastic life also included children as well as married and celibates and also involved people with many kinds of skills.

Gonzalez says only a scant amount about the Irish church:

Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, but Christianity had spread to it before the downfall of the Empire. Although this probably took place through several channels, the spread of Christianity to Ireland is usually attributed to St. Patrick. … Since Ireland was bypassed by the wave of invasions that swept Europe, her monasteries became one of the main sources from which the territories within the ancient Roman Empire regained much of what had been lost during the invasions.

The Irish then began sending missionaries to other countries, most notably to Scotland. The most famous of these missionaries was Columba, who settled on the small island of Iona with twelve companions, probably in A.D. 563. …

For reasons that are not altogether clear, there were a number of differences between this Scotch-Irish [American term] Christianity and that which had evolved in the former territories of the Roman Empire. Instead of being ruled by bishops, the Scotch-Irish church was under the leadership of the heads of monastic communities. They also differed on the manner in which a number of rites should be performed, and on the date of Easter. [235-236]

Here I digress for a moment to say that there is much popular association with St. Patrick and all things nationally “Irish” when we speak of the Celtic church. However, I think it a little silly. I once researched my own Scott family surname and discovered that, although the clan is associated with Lowland Scots today, it was precisely the geographical area of Ireland they came from where St. Patrick operated. And it was they who first gave their clan name to Ireland as “Scotia” before moving across to Scotland and giving the same name to that part of Great Britain. So we may as easily say the early church was Scottish as Irish, if you measure by the people and not the land. However, when Columba went to Scotland, he met a different group of people than the ones he left in Ireland as the Scots (or Irish) hadn’t gone to Scotland yet! (Nor had some of the Irish yet become Irish.) The problem with merging ourselves back into history is that lands and peoples change in time, both on our end and on the original Desert Christian end.

Returning to topic again, many have tried in our day to get back to the simplicity of the gospel in various and sundry ways by starting up churches in homes. Most have not crossed over into all-out monastic living, though a few have developed closed communities. From my point of view, the closed communities have largely invited disaster, turning into (in many cases) oppressive cults. And in the cases of the house churches, they often wind up in another hierarchical system or wind up back in the big building because they just can’t leave it alone. The megashift of 325 A.D. is too much a part of them.

A few have gone the “Celtic church” route, but bigger than ever, practically every one has proven itself to be another flash-in-the-pan for the same reasons as above. They just can’t leave Constantine alone. All that is changed is the tone of the liturgy and one wonders why they bothered. Could a true Celtic-style church be revived and could all cultures re-develop indigenous churches? I think it possible, provided they stick to the most organic kinds of relationships and quit officializing and prescribing everything. But I also believe that as soon as we try to develop this or that kind of church, we kill it. It’s not about having a “Celtic” or any other kind of church. It’s about going back to the simplicity of the gospel and doing it in such a way that it feels natural to our culture, that we have a healthy narrative to pass on, and that we forget how we used to do it and get back to normal-sized groups of relationship — say 10-20 persons max.

I can easily envision separate groups of monastics with ties to one another operating as “the church” in an area. These contrived “teams” that are sent out by institutional churches today are probably a stab at this, though the relationships begin as ordered roles and not as organic realities. I’m quite curious to see a set of organic relationships develop into a team without benefit of top-down ordering. It is from this collegiality that the mature elders will be recognized and supported by the community as they watch for the souls in their charge.

Having finished the book, The Story of Christianity, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984) — and now going back over the parts of it that I highlighted — I realize one simple fact concerning the reason I even picked it up in the first place. I was trying to see how close the Western fringes of the Celtic church matched the early church in Jerusalem and then in Egypt. But what I find is a continental church history having absolutely nothing to do with that virginal outcrop. Questions of Gnosticism, apostolic succession, hierarchy, and world powers had not seemingly touched the far Western church. It could not seriously be argued that a return to the Orthodox Church or any of the Oriental churches today would return the Western church to its original condition, as these are not what they once were when they sent the first emissaries to the West.

Only a fool would argue that Constantine had no great influence on the church. Of course, it just took a lot longer for that influence to reach the far West — through various stages and kinds of conquest. I probably highlighted a quarter of the earliest chapters in the book. To be sure, the church was completely different in the mainstream than on the fringes after that and had normed everything according to Constantine. For all of that norming, there remains much influence of folk religion in the areas where the church has always been strongest. Folk religion aside, we may deduce that, had Constantine not arrived on the scene, each region would still have marked its worship with its own culture. The Council at Nicea did not create an orthodoxy that did not exist among many church gatherngs already — it just spelled it out officially and enforced it with the backing of the state from then on. Ironically, a new church was created out of this merger with the state that undermined it ever since.

Let us turn to Gonzalez again to note some of these changes (which, as I say, had nothing to do with the far West):

Until Constantine’s time, Christian worship had been relatively simple. At first, Christians gathered to worship in private homes. Then they began to gather in cemeteries, such as the Roman catacombs. By the third century there were structures set aside for worship. The oldest church that archaeologists have discovered is that of Dura-Europos, which dates from about A.D. 250. This is a fairly small room, decorated with very simple murals.

After Constantine’s conversion Christian worship began to be influenced by imperial protocol. Incense, which was used as a sign of respect for the emperor, began appearing in Christian churches. Officiating ministers, who until then had worn everyday clothes, began dressing in more luxurious garments. Likewise, a number of gestures indicating respect, which were normally made before the emperor, now became part of Christian worship. The custom was also introduced of beginning services with a processional. Choirs were developed, partly in order to give body to that procession. Eventually the congregation came to have a less active role in worship.

Already in the second century, it had become customary to commemorate the anniversary of a martyr’s death by celebrating communion where the martyr had been buried. Now churches were built in many of those places. Eventually, some came to think that worship as particularly valid if it was celebrated in one of those holy places, where the relics of a martyr were present … [Gonzalez, 125]

Isn’t it interesting that even Gonzalez begins to use the word “church” in a meaning that begins to shift almost imperceptibly from meaning the “body of believers” to meaning a “building”? He does not offer an explanation of this, perhaps because it was unconscious on his part or perhaps because its usage is so common now that he felt no need to explain.

As to the practice of collecting relics — particularly dead saints’ bones, I suspect this falls under the category of regional custom. I cannot imagine the early Jewish believers doing such a thing. I find its normalization particularly interesting. It may have served a culturally relevant purpose in its point of origin, but it might have been ill received in a place where the inhabitants were not naturally disposed to harboring such relics. Example: in my own culture, we do not maintain such things — not because we are afraid of death as some have charged, but because we consider such relics unclean. I remember how horribly shocked I was the first time I saw pictures of the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia. I thought it must be some kind of anti-Christ place filled with fallen priests of the Black Arts. Now I realize that this must be how the culture of that day redeemed a tragedy of slaughter.

I found the origin of the incense quite fascinating. The oldest churches worship with all the senses. I was brought up to worship with none of my senses except common sense, and even that could be debated. My faith was much more interiorized and I felt it a mark of security that if I should ever lose sight, sound, taste, and the rest, I could still find God in my soul. But should I really say I lost all these senses in worship? If so, I was “taught” to do so, but it was not the reality of my daily life. Once more church culture is “churchy” because it is not where we really live.

After reading of the Celtic dislike of structure and love of nature, I realized I had not lost that heritage in my private life, no matter the enforced church culture. The night skies filled with stars were my ceiling. I could imagine Abraham looking at the same stars in the desert. I remembered the smell of freshly plowed dirt and the scent of soon-rain in the air, full of mystery and engagement. To me, this always evoked the Creator –who else would have put it there? Perhaps that was my heaven and my incense all along. My institutional church only fooled themselves into thinking they had snuffed out that nonsense.

Here we go again as I drag my readers through yet another wickedly ragged jaunt to learn the fine points of how the Church departed from the gospel. The Church got a lot of things right — we must confess. It isn’t the broad brush strokes that take us off on wrong trajectories, though. It’s always the small things that do us in — didn’t Jesus say the little foxes spoil the grapes?

Recently, I have run into some who marginalize the scriptures as a guide to knowing Christ, citing instead the indwelling spirit as being all that is needed. Ironically, they would not have known Him had the written account not been preserved. Minimizing the scriptures’ importance has taken the Church in two opposite directions — that of licentiousness or that of overbearing authority. Neither can be dealt with without taking into account scripture and the revealed nature of God.

If any us lack wisdom, we must go to God who pours out liberally that these things may be opened to us. (James 1:5) Now for my part, I believe that scripture opens things of spirit and spirit opens things of scripture. When the key to what we seek is found, we must open the door and pass through.

I see that there is much disunity regarding church authority, what it is, who holds it and what they have authority over. This question has perplexed many, many saints who have cast off church authority for good reasons or have stayed and served in spite of much wickedness. I thought some clue might be found by comparing the subject matter of the Council of Jerusalem with that of the Councils following.

I was miserably and reluctantly prepared to spend weeks poring over the particulars of each instance when I discovered the simplest pieces of evidence that seemed to unlock the whole thing. Judging the question “by what authority?” is nigh impossible on the basis of how long a line of authority has been in place. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for an answer.

Paul’s account of the Jewish-Gentile matter came when he confronted Peter in Antioch about the matter of Judaizing. Paul wanted a pure gospel — one that truly set free. He established that point in the letter to the Galatians. The author of Acts, writing from a Gentile perspective, credited the decision by the Council of Jerusalem. In any case, the matter was resolved in such a way that no heavy burdens were placed on the Church, and the saints “rejoiced for the consolation”. The following six Councils bogged themselves down with the most hairsplitting doctrines concerning the nature of Christ. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” characterized the decisions that came out of these.

Jesus never addressed the issue of how His humanity and divinity co-existed. That He is both God and Man seemed to be enough for the gospel according to John and was accepted by the other Apostles as best we can tell. No Councils were ever called to dispute this. Paul talked about heresies, winds of doctrines and “itching ears” many years earlier, yet no Council was ever called for such things! Instead, it was called over the matter of keeping the Law. This is not to say that there weren’t many strange doctrines troubling the Church, but isn’t it interesting that Paul and the other Apostles are not recorded as having violent arguments over any of them? From this, I think we can gather that putting the Law into perspective was more important, as it maintained the fundamental truth that the Gospel was truly “good news” at its core.

The matter of preserving the faith was addressed in the local bodies to whom Paul and the other Apostles wrote their epistles. Jude writes:

Jud 1:3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort [you] that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

Paul had previously written letters addressing certain cases of immorality or heresy. Those who called themselves “brothers” ought to be confronted by various means within the church in a city and possibly put out of the assembly in extreme cases. The Church did not waste its efforts hunting down preachers of strife and heresies, but put them out of its homes, leaving them to their own devices. Only after 325 A.D. did Councils take matters into their own hands and enforce uniformity as a matter of rule.

A sea change occurred in the Church beginning at 325 A.D. when Constantine unified the empire and called for a Church Council. From that point, the Church (as it was defined ever since) placed weights and burdens on the Body, developing ordinances and laws of its own.

Constantine summoned the bishops at imperial expense to Nicea, 30 miles from his imperial capital in Nicomedia. Here they were to settle their differences in a council over which he presided. ["Seven Ecumenical Councils", Peninsula Bible Church Cupertino]

How does an emperor summon the Church of Christ and then preside over its Council? How do Church leaders cast their crowns before a world leader? Unbelievable! Didn’t Jesus say, “My kingdom is not of this world?” There can be no doubt. The Church had been converted into one of the kingdoms of this world. The leaders bound themselves as well as the Church Body to the world system. That explains everything. There is no reason at this point to even consider any Council that has ever been convened since.

The Church was snatched by one not Her Father. It does not matter whether Constantine had converted or not. He had no right to preside over the Church and do it a “favor” by making it uniform. The headship of Jesus Christ was effectively replaced by a man with great ideas for what he could do with it, however sincere he might have been. It was not taken, however, but willingly handed over by weak men. The authority that God gave to His servants did not need to be strengthened by the state. At that moment, if there was an Apostolic succession in the beginning, there surely was a bait-and-switch into a succession determined by the interests of a conflicting kingdom. And so the glory of the Lord departed, rarely seen in its former power since.

The Church became a servant of this world and attracted many strange creatures under its cloak. In the process, it became an unholy mixture and lost a good part of its identity. The deception has gone on for so long that even its ministers do not know they are living in a bubble. One scarcely knows where to begin to unravel the truth unless the Lord reveals it.

The deception has clouded the understanding of the institutional church ever since so that practically all its ministers are unconsciously affected. They continue to spread the infection of the mixture and do not know why the Church runs in circles to this day. Or why they can serve so faithfully only to be beaten up by thieves and left in the road like the stranger traveling to Jericho.

The Didache gives us the earliest glimpse into Church matters after the times of the New Testament canon. In fact, it has a section on recognizing spiritual trainers and apostles-prophets, mentioning nothing about ordination papers.

11:1 [A] Whoever, then, should train you beforehand in all these things said beforehand,
receive him/her.
11:2 [B] If on_the_other_hand, the one training,
him/herself, having been turned around,
should train [you] in another tradition
[1] for the destroying [of things said beforehand],
do not listen to him/her;
[2] but, [if it is] for the supplementing of justice
and knowledge of [the] Lord
receive him/her as [the] Lord!

11:3 And concerning the apostle-prophets,
in_accordance_with the decree of the good news,
act thus:

11:4 [A] (And) every apostle coming to you,
let [him/her] be received as [the] Lord:
11:5 [1] he/she will not remain, on_the_other_hand, except one day;
[2] (and) if ever there be need, also another [day];
[3] (but) if ever he/she should remain three [days],
he/she is a false prophet.
11:6 (And) going_out,
[1] let the apostle taking nothing except a loaf
[that he/she needs to tide him/her over]
until he/she might lodge in another [courtyard],
[2] if, on_the_other_hand, he/she should ask for silver,
he/she is a false prophet. [from The Didache, trans. by Aaron Milavec]

If one finally understands that the fault lies not with the individuals working out of the institutionalized church it is easier to forgive knowing that they also labor under the same “heavy burdens” that we are throwing off. We can understand why believers oppress other believers and think they are serving God (we have done this ourselves). God intended us to discern His ministers by the spirit instead of by their papers. Jesus told us:

Mat 7:17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
Mat 7:18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither [can] a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Mat 7:19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Mat 7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.