Refusing to Be Involved with Churches of a Different Christian Persuasion

My response to a question from Jule from my last post, Following God to the Best of My Ability Versus Expecting Others to Follow God Like Me, became somewhat lengthy so I made a new post. I have not made this my post for this week because I have something else that I want to get out of me.

Jule asked how the "Don't worry about the speck in your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own" and "Iron sharpens iron" relate to what I wrote.

Here is my attempt to meld everything together.

This whole subject has been on my mind because our leadership just refused to host the community Thanksgiving service. Some comments were made about people in the other churches not being our "brothers in Christ." Our church has never hosted a community service but I thought I would give them a chance, so at the Antwerp ministerial meeting earlier this month I volunteered our church after being asked if we would be willing to host it. I attend as our churches representative because I believe in inter-church involvement and we were not participating. I have since had to call up the leader of the group and tell him our church would not host or even participate since the community is on a Sunday night and we have services then. That situation has forced me to think this through.

What I wrote is my failed attempt to work through the verses and explain to the leadership that we can fellowship with people who might have a different take on following Christ. In the end, I think they just didn't want the conflict that hosting would cause within our church. What I find amazing is how different the church of Christ/Christian church is in different parts of the nation. Some are ultra-conservative while others are liberal. Antwerp is ultra-conservative, although other neighboring towns are even more conservative.

The context of the "speck" verse (Matthew 7) does seem to encourage us to help one another out despite being the pillar for the practice of total tolerance and individual spirituality. Jesus warns that we must be vigilant to not use a different standard of judgment for others than we use for ourselves, but he does not tell us to let our brothers and sisters do their own thing without us noticing their faults. Verse 5 reads, "You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." We should not go around helping people with something we struggle in, but we do need to go around helping. We need to "see clearly" so that we can "remove the speck" from our brothers' or sisters' eyes.

We need to be growing in Christ all the time. If we are not, we will never really be able to help a brother out. If we see a brother struggling with something we struggle with, we should pray for strength to fix ourselves before attempting to fix our brother. Sometimes it is easier to see our faults in others rather than in the mirror. Jesus abhorred hypocrites (Matthew 23), but that does not mean we are not supposed to help a stumbling person out. As the proverb says, "Iron sharpens iron." If we are left alone to our own vices and our own form of spirituality, we will eventually lose our usefulness. Believers need one another. We need to not shirk our responsibility to our brothers and sisters in the name of tolerance, yet we must always remain careful to not be judgmental.