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“Re-Creating the Corinthian Church”
Categories: Meditations
I’m currently in a Sunday-morning Bible class that is studying 1 Corinthians. As the teacher observed, if any church in the New Testament has a bad name, it is the church in Corinth. Only the church in Sardis can compare, and we have much more information about the misdeeds of the Corinthian brethren. In fact, Christians today will often use the problems of the church in Corinth as part of an appeal to church unity. The argument goes, “If first-century Christians were supposed to stick it out in a rotten church like Corinth, we shouldn’t leave our not-nearly-as-rotten congregations today!”
Less frequently, though, do we pause to ask why the church in Corinth was the way it was. We don’t see evidence of the same kind of problems in the church in Lystra, for instance, and I think it’s because the Lystran congregation wasn’t made up of the same kind of people.
Many of the churches that Paul established had a high percentage of Jews and so-called God-fearers, Gentiles who believed in the God of Israel but weren’t willing to become proselytes because of the social implications of circumcision and food restrictions. Thus, Paul could appoint elders in all of the churches of the first missionary journey almost immediately because many of the “new” converts had been living righteous lives for decades.
Not so in Corinth. Unlike other accounts of evangelism success in Acts, Acts 18 does not mention large numbers of God-fearers obeying the gospel. Some Jews did, but most remained hostile. Instead, the Corinthian church contained significant numbers of people who came out of the wicked lifestyles mentioned in the doleful catalogue of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, practitioners of homosexuality, and so forth.
There is also evidence in 1 Corinthians that many Corinthian disciples were former members of pagan mystery cults who tried to import mystery-cult practices into the worship of Jesus. Not surprisingly, elders do not appear in any of the Biblical accounts of Corinth. The necessary baseline of spiritual maturity wasn’t present.
It is also hardly surprising when a church with many converts from the world with all kinds of baggage has serious problems. However, let’s not miss the forest for the trees here. Corinth was a church WITH MANY CONVERTS FROM THE WORLD. Today, we may pride ourselves on how well behaved our congregations are compared to Corinth, but the good behavior is due to the near absence of new converts.
Here, I fear, is one of the underlying reasons for the near-universal failure of the Lord’s church in the United States to be evangelistically effective. We have our nice little churches, full of nice people from the right social classes, and we don’t want to reach out to the have-nots with all kinds of lifestyle problems, even though they are the ones most likely to listen.
Do you want to go to church with somebody who thinks incest is a grand idea? Do you want to go to church with people who are so disputatious they sue each other left and right? Do you want to go to church with people who view Christianity as a way to reject the rules of polite society?
Exactly.
If we want to re-create the first-century church, we have to be willing to re-create the Corinthian church. Yes, dealing with converts with baggage can be horrendously frustrating (just ask Paul!), but if we want to have evangelistic success, we can’t go to the folks who think they’re well. We have to go to the folks who know they’re sick.
