HOW DARE JIM LYONS UPSET WHAT WAS SET IN CONCRETE IN THE
BEGINNING WHEN GOD LED THE BYRUM BROTHERS TO RELOCATE GOSPEL TRUMPET COMPANY
FROM MOUNDSVILLE, WVA TO ANDERSON, IN!
The very impudence changing that is mind-boggling … to some.
What was established by God must forever remain! We dare not tamper with what
God brought forth, or we become like ancient Israel touching, carrying lightly
the “holy things” of God.
Relocating the 2014 North American Convention from the Indiana
cornfields to the Oklahoma oil-fields is producing “Richter Scale reactions” for
some. For people who value the long tradition of the NAC/GA in Anderson, the
upscale values of AU education, and the list could go on, and in a few
instances the personal effects are cataclysmic, turning some people’s lives
upside down, or inside out, as the case may be. The Movement is no longer what
it once was!
While I may have slightly overstated the case, I want to
introduce an idea we don’t discuss often. We are a pretty traditional people,
whether we will admit it or not. We do not change easily, especially if we
think we are right. J
Changing NAC 2014 from Anderson to OKC offers a handle for introducing this a comment
from a former colleague and friend, B. Gale Hetrick: “The fact that we refused
to accept the formal processes of organization only resulted in slowing the
evolution of structure” (Hetrick/Laughter
Among the Trumpets/1980/105).
Movementally, we grew to adult immaturity as a reactionary
movement and we still get some pretty good knee-jerks. One of our weak joints
was our firm conviction of the worthlessness of organization. You can readily trace
the thread of our anti-organization bias.
Hetrick had just been called from his Kalamazoo pastorate to
a position of State leadership in the Church of God in Michigan. Establishing
his home in Okemos, MI (East Lansing), he found himself building on a structure
some would characterize as a still-born baby or a prematurely-born fetus. He
slowly nurtured that “preemie” that had not been properly planned for. C. E.
Brown, future Editor in Chief but then pastor in Detroit, helped deliver that
baby at Lansing South Church of God in 1920.
I call it somewhat “still born” because it was so
developmentally challenged. That group of Michigan ministers made a decision
and acted upon it, but before Brown knew it, he was quickly challenged by national
leaders. Setting up a state organization was seen as competitive with the only
working structure they had thus far allowed themselves, and that was the
recently formed, still new, 1917 Ministerial Assembly.
This is not the place for a historical treatise, but it
registered enough on their Richter Scale that Brown candidly confessed and rightly
concluded, “We brethren in Michigan did what was, for the time, a daring
thing.” He did concede that it was a birth greatly-needed. Ministers circulated
freely with questionable credentials. Churches and pastors each experienced their
own peculiar difficulties with times of transition. Factually, they had no
mechanism with which to deal with such problems or the resulting conflict when they
became too obvious to longer sweep them under the ecclesiastical rug.
The rest of it is history and today the Lansing, MI Service
Center of the Church of God finds itself a highly respected coordinative
and administrative agency under the able leadership of Dr. William (Bill)
Jones, a devoted churchman. The Command Center he supervses details a long list
of interlinking Ministries that resource each other. The Service Center is a
State Government of sorts, co-equal with every other state administration,
while each is also interdependent upon one another and co-equal with Chog Ministries in Anderson, which serves in the capacity of Federal Coordinator.
By 2013-14 this interlinking mesh of organizational
structures is how the Church of God does business. It also reflects our
attitudinal change from anti-organization to viewing organization as a means to
an end, that end being the mission for which God brought us into being.
A few years back, the Program
Committee of the now defunct Central States Ministers Meeting requested Church
Historian Merle Strege present a paper dealing with the issue of authority in
the Church of God Movement. Strege consequently presented a prepared paper he
called “Managers and Sages: The Idea of Authority and the Church of God
Movement.” As the elected historical authority in the church, Strege told
attendees at the March 1989 Meeting this “Historian” story.
According to history, former
Missionary Board Executive C. Lowry Quinn once asked F. G. Smith for some
personal advice on how Smith managed to become Editor-in-Chief of the Gospel
Trumpet by the young age of thirty-five. Smith’s reply was, “I got in line and
I stayed in line” (Strege, Managers and Sages: The Idea of Authority and The
Church of God Movement”, 1989 (worth reading if you can find it.)
As was my custom, I filed that
paper, delivered in Saint Joseph in 1989. Looking back, I find Strege wrestling
with this same demon that has plagued us across the years, from Warner until
today. Strege offered classic instances of times when we were challenged by this
problem in one way or another. It happened as early as when Enoch Byrum succeeded
D. S. Warner and re-interpreted some of his pronouncements. Hetrick faced it again when asked
to become the Administrator of an organization that was no organization at the
time.
This issue, like a bad penny, periodically reappears; or maybe, it just
never totally disappears. Gale built the Church of God in Michigan upon the
biblical concept of Jesus and the idea of servanthood. That is very different
from the trap of centralized authority that F. G. Smith fell into when he asked
his GA peers to pass a resolution that the Church publish only that which was
in line with our standard teachings, which at that time happened to be those
outlined by – guess who – F. G. Smith. It was that power grabbing that the
Assembly sensed and opposed when they replaced Smith in the seat of the Editor
in Chief, who was then the church’s chief spokesman.
Strege’s 21-page paper distinguishes between what he
described as Managers and Sages and he used two Latin words to find the best
authority: auctores and auctor. Papal authority is basically auctores and
resides in the office held. Auctor is what we lift up for Jim Lyons to achieve.
We elected him and gave him “an office” but as every pastor knows, Jim must
earn that “authority” by how he serves the church as we work together in achieving
what we believe God calls us to do as the Church of God.
We have long understood the church is the Body of Christ,
inhabited by the mind of Christ. That means we are interdependent and mutually
accountable. It means as we become more like Jesus (who is our maturity) we
become less independent, less autonomous, less of a loosely-jointed
amalgamation or association and we become a strong healthy body, lithe of limb,
trim rather than obese, every member actively functioning in the same kind of
good works Jesus did when upon earth.
We are a work in process and how we come together will
determine our usefulness. From Warner’s World, this is
walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com.
