About Jesus

About Jesus Steve Sweetman

My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze

Part 24

The Legalization Of Church

Warning! The contents of this chapter may be offensive and disturbing to some, and does not necessarily reflect the common consensus of the Christian community at large. Read the following at your own risk, understanding the source of where these words originate. You might want to extend a little extra grace to someone like me who walks a few feet off the beaten trail. I guess it’s up to you whether you consider me a trail-blazer or a wacko wandering in the wilderness of my own imagination. I’m probably somewhere in between these two extremes, but you may beg to differ.

Historically speaking, the state of Virginia has always been very socially and religiously conservative, but that has changed. It’s my understanding that in recent months the Virginia legislature passed a law stating that no government funded chaplain could pray in public using the “name of Jesus” in his or her prayer. All prayers are now mandated to be prayed to “a generic god”. In case you don’t know, Christians don’t serve a generic god. We serve “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Despite popular opinion, prayers directed to a generic god aren’t necessarily answered by God because they’re prayed to someone other than Him. This is just one of many examples showing how government has divorced itself from Christian thought. As I stated in the last chapter, this puts the squeeze on both individual Christians as well as the church. It’s now up to the Christian community to determine how we react to the pressure of this squeeze.

Talking about being squeezed, I like the Philip’s translation of Romans 12:1. It reads, “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold…” This is something you might want to think about, if you begin to feel the squeeze from the world around you.

In 1972 my friends and I who had been serving Jesus in a variety of ways decided to become “an official church” by becoming a “registered charity” as it was called in Canada back then. To become a “real church” in the eyes of the government we had to draft a constitution. This document consisted of our legal name, a mission statement giving the reason for our existence, and our organizational structure which included the names and addresses of our board of directors. The constitution, along with all sorts of other paperwork was submitted to the federal government who in turn gave us “legal status” with a special tax number. The tax number allowed us to offer income tax receipts for those who donated money to our organization. Each year thereafter we would file a financial report to the government so they could keep an eye on us.

In the early 1990’s a group I was associated with went through the same legalities to become a “real church” as well. This seems to be the thing to do in our ecclesiastical culture, as if there is some scriptural mandate for us to become “legal”. In both the early 1970’s and the 1990’s it never crossed my mind that the legalization of church could become a problem. It was just standard procedure for a group of Christians if they wanted to be seen as a real church.

I suppose as long as government is our friend there’s no real problem legalizing church, but such is not necessarily the case any more. Western governments are progressively becoming more hostile towards Christian thinking. The church is often finding itself on the wrong side of the law since western governments are forsaking Christianity to be married to the “religion of tolerance” with its “generic god”. The conditions set forth in the separation agreement of this hostile divorce is putting more restrictions on the church, making it submit to an ungodly world view. This divorce is also landing many Christian groups in court, where they’re having to defend their position.

The time is fast approaching that unless churches submit to the government’s “religion of tolerance” we’ll lose our special “legal status”. For this reason and a few other reasons I’m quickly beginning to think that our “legal status” is not worth keeping. It’s becoming an unholy alliance with an unholy institution that only entangles us in things that burden us down. This reminds me of Hebrews 12:1 that says, “throw off everything that hinders us …let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

I know that most Christians reading these words won’t agree with my recommendation and that’s fine. I do respect each of you as a brother or sister in Christ. Even though it’s not the general consensus of Christians as yet, I think the time is near, if not already here, to “throw off” the legal status of our churches. I believe this legal status is beginning to hinder us from running the race. If we don’t willingly hand back our legal status, it might be taken from us anyway. It’s just a matter of how we get “delegalized”. Do we freely hand it back or do we wait until it’s taken from us?

I know what many people will say about such a drastic and ridiculous idea. How can we even entertain such a thought? How would our modern church survive? This would undermine all that we know of church. Forsaking our legal status would mean we’d have to pay property taxes and not offer tax receipts. The payment of property taxes would over-extend our budgets, and make our finances unmanageable. Not being able to offer tax receipts would severely cut into our income stream. This would destroy the economy of church as we know it, losing any resemblance to the church that presently exists.

To all of these questions and concerns I say, “I certainly agree”. All of what I just said and more would happen. The change that would come about from “delegalizing church” would cripple the church as we know it in the western world. The result of such “delegaliztion” might well turn the church into the Body of functioning believers, and the “counter-cultural community of Christ” that we were meant to be in the first place. I know I might sound like an old anti-establishment hippie from the sixties, and maybe I am at heart. I think you can agree that the church has thrived in countries where it has lived as this “counter-cultural community of Christ”. It has thrived despite “government intolerance in a world of tolerance”. Such has been the case throughout the centuries when God’s people experience persecution.

I’ve been around church long enough to know that most people will write this chapter off as a dumb and probably stupid idea, and I certainly understand why. If you don’t feel inclined to forsake your legal status, then at least prepare yourself for the possibility that you’ll have it taken from you unless you’re willing to compromise your convictions. At the point we fail to submit to the religion of tolerance we might well see the New Testament church emerge that consists of true followers of our Lord Jesus Christ. It won’t matter then where we meet or the size of our meetings. It won’t matter if we get a tax receipt for the money we give. It won’t matter if our money goes to needy brothers and sisters in Christ instead of the building fund. It won’t matter if the closest brother in Christ down the street is a Baptist when we’re of the Pentecostal persuasion. Arguments over whether we should pave our parking lot or build a neon sign will be meaningless because we’ll have neither.

If this indeed is our fate, most things won’t matter at that point. What will matter is our allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ expressed in terms that we saw in the three Hebrew men of Daniel 3:16 – 18. When confronted with the decision to either serve God or the state, they chose God by publically proclaiming, “O king … we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it … but even if He does not … we will not serve your god…” May the conviction of these three men be ours today in a progressively humanistic and hostile world.

When thinking of “delegalizing”, I’m thinking in terms of churches, not para-church organizations. These organizations don’t claim to be a church, but an organization to meet a specific need, such as the American or Canadian Bible Society.

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