Sunday, June 15, 2014: Matthew 28:16-20

Baptize, teach, remember. With such basic instructions, I wonder how church got so complicated. We have committees and boards, initiatives and task forces, councils and conferences, doctrines and dogmas. We even have trials to enforce it all.

This bureaucracy may have something to do with how we refine and revise our processes. New procedures are built on what came before. When we want to reform, we go back only as far as the last thing—more like renovating than reforming. We never go all the way back to the basic building block, a true remodeling project.

Basing our latest, greatest ideas on the most recent idea, which apparently wasn’t so great or we wouldn’t be revising it, runs the risk of continuing down a path that is already off course. This just puts us farther afield. A few centuries of this and before we know it, we don’t recall the basics, much less the reasons for implementing them. Most of us can think of any number of issues currently debated within church judicatories where we “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”