John was not only a full-time minister and elder, he was the disciple who had perhaps the closest personal friendship with Jesus Christ himself. And yet, then there was Diotrephes--a leader of his local church--who went around forbidding John to preach in his church.
Again, a number of people have told me "don't question the church". But if this were the case shouldn't John have just backed off and respected the decision of the church? "I'll leave it up to God to correct Diotrephes—since Diotrephes is the leader of his church, I cannot question him"?
But he didn't. In fact, he went the opposite direction and was very critical of Diotrephes. Why is that? Was it because John was an elder from Jerusalem and thus "outranked" Diotrephes? Or was it because John saw grave injustice and imminent danger in the behavior of a church leader who wantonly excommunicated members for reasons that to him were so clearly spurious?
The Bible doesn't say much about Diotrephes's history; in fact it doesn't even describe much about the local church he presided over. It does describe what sort of person he was. According to John's letter to Gaius, he was the sort of person who "loved to be first". He did not welcome John nor any other ministers with whom he disagreed; to the contrary, he spread "malicious nonsense" about them. He even went so far as to ostracize any other believers who sided with John to the point of threatening to put them out of the church.
I sometimes wonder about how it got that way. I don't think Diotrephes woke up one morning and decided "from now on I'm going to be a jerk". No, it was probably much more gradual than that. Maybe when Diotrephes started out doing holy work he had the very best intentions in mind. Maybe when he started out he really had a pure faith and love for God. But maybe over time things changed.
What's most frightening of all is that in his own mind, maybe he never realized that he was changing.
Perhaps he took his job as a leader of his church very seriously, which meant that he felt a responsibility to "maintain order". Maybe he felt that to keep "order" in his church he had to silence any opposing voices. After all, the last thing a church leader needs is rabble rousers stirring up dissent and commotion among the members of his church.
Maybe he looked at the members of his church and figured that they weren't sophisticated enough to discern truth nor grow in the Holy Spirit themselves, and so he felt an obligation to be their sole spiritual guide and protector, sheltering them from any teachings except for those that he alone decided were the "proper".
And maybe over the years, Diotrephes found himself surrounded by people who supported him and because of his position in the church didn't feel like it was "their place" to correct him when they saw him doing things he perhaps shouldn't be doing. Or worse, maybe groupthink took over in the church congregation and the congregation felt it was better for the sake of "unity" to stand behind Diotrephes and to shun those who spoke against him, regardless of how constructive the criticism against him was.
In my first post I quoted a line from Dietrich Boenhoffer. If you don't know who this is, I urge you to get this book. Because there are lessons from this man's life that you need to know and which very much apply to us today..
Now before I write any more, I'm going to say this. In the rest of this post I'm going to talk about Nazi Germany and Hitler and other kinds of ugly things. Be very clear that in no way whatsoever am I directly comparing anyone or anything to Nazi Germany or Hitler. But if there are even small lessons we can learn from seeing what happened to the Christian church in Germany, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
While we may not think of Germany as a Christian nation today, it has a long and storied Christian background. Remember that Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Revolution, came from Germany. 400 years later Germany was still predominantly made up of followers of Christ. In 1933 the German population was about 60 million, 20 million of whom identified as Roman Catholic and 40 million as Protestants. Other religions such as Judaism represented less than 1% of the total population.
While this sounds impressive, the reality is that church worship had grown dead. Or so preached the young minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
At age 13 Bonhoeffer decided that he wanted to study theology. He enrolled at Tubingen University in Germany at the age of 17 and he earned his PhD at the young age of 21. His love of theology turned into a love for the church. He felt a calling to be ordained as a minister in the church in Germany.
Prior to starting his ministry at the minimum age of 25 Bonhoeffer got to experience what churches were like in other parts of the world. When in Rome one Palm Sunday he visited St. Peter's Basilica and while he wasn't a Roman Catholic, he developed great respect for the Catholic church and attended many of their services. He was amazed to see people of every race and color celebrating the Eucharist together and contrasted it to the churches in Germany which were monolithic in race, nationality, and culture.
Later, he had the opportunity to travel to the United States to study. A friend invited him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City with its vast African American congregation. There, he noticed that the congregation wasn't just going through the motions of "attending church services". Their services were deep and meaningful, with powerful preaching, exuberant hymn singing, and genuine worship from the heart. Their minister exhorted the congregation not just to have an authentic relationship with Jesus, but to put that faith into action by caring for the poor and practicing the things that Jesus preached.
This worship was in stark contrast to churches in Germany, where by that point worship had turned cold. Believers would attend church every Sunday, patting themselves on the back for just showing up and sitting through the entire services on the hard pews.
Traditional preaching from the German clergy focused on intellectual topics and was devoid of any kind of personal and "real" experience as Bonhoeffer had seen in America. Bonhoeffer preached of the "Word of God", trying to tell the congregation that the point of worship wasn't to analyze the text but to reach the God behind the text. But this concept was foreign to most Germans.
In one of his earliest sermons after being ordained he preached to a local church on Reformation Sunday. While in Germany this was usually a patriotic day for Germans as they celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther, Bonhoeffer spoke out boldly against the direction the church was going. He said it was "high time we realized" that the German church was dying, or in fact was already dead, as dead as their hero Martin Luther.
In the meantime, political change was brewing. Germany was in a shambles after the first World War. The Treaty of Versailles had left the German people humiliated. The economy was in a shambles. The Weimar Republic was completely ineffective, and only seem to introduce new levels of decadence and moral degeneration. There was a growing threat of godless communist ideology taking over.
We know today that privately Hitler had complete disdain for Christianity. And yet at that time, knowing that he had to win over the Christians in Germany, he invoked God often in his early speeches. In his first speech as chancellor he declared, "We are determined, as leaders of the nation, to fulfill as a national government the task which has been given to us, swearing loyalty only to God, our conscience, and our people". He declared that his government would make Christianity "the basis of our collective morality". The speech ended with the statement "May God Almighty take our work into his grace!" In another speech, he spoke of Jesus Christ being "our greatest Aryan" (ludicrously ignoring the fact that Jesus was Jewish).
With the benefit of hindsight we know today the extent of the evil of the Nazi party and of Adolf Hitler. But back then the vast majority of Christians heard this impressive man mention Christianity and they were convinced that he was on their side.
Bonhoeffer was one of the few ministers who saw Hitler for who he was from the beginning. In a radio address just two days after Hitler became chancellor, Bonhoeffer preached that true authority must by definition submit to a higher authority, a message which in only a short time would be tantamount to preaching treason.
But the combination of nationalistic fervor that was sweeping Germany and the weak, soporific state of the church spelled disaster. Despite Bonhoeffer's pleas for the church to fight against the increasing Nazi influence over her most believers stayed silent. Some of them no doubt observed injustices going on but chose to keep silent, figuring that "God would fix it eventually". Others were oblivious to anything happening at all, preferring to remain in their comfort zone, attending services every week, and not questioning what was going on.
One of the Nazi's first steps was to purge the German church of all "Jewish elements", excommunicating members who had any kind of Jewish heritage. Later on, certain scriptures and eventually the entire Old Testament were no longer permitted because they were "too Jewish". Church elections were rigged so that those who only supported a certain point of view occupied the leadership positions.
A new group of pastors who stood behind Hitler's rise called themselves the "German Christians". They felt that supporting Hitler would result in strong, unified church that preached a bold, aggressive message of standing up and defeating their enemies. The German Christians elected Ludwig Muller, a Hitler supporter, as the head of the national church. Over the years, the national church started to forbid the publishing, printing, selling or distribution of the Bible. It replaced the cross with the "only unconquerable symbol", the swastika. On all church altars there was to be nothing but Hitler's Mein Kampf, and a sword to the left of it.
And yet through all this, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, the German congregations sat still. When Bonhoeffer dared to preach messages that it was hypocritical for the congregation to sing hymns to God on one hand but on the other hand remain completely silent to what God was calling them to do, many were offended.
Bonhoeffer left the church and with a group of like-minded pastors formed what became known as "The Confessing Church". He helped formed a seminary and a secret community where he taught the students that their duty was not simply to uphold the tenets of the Lutheran church, but to go beyond that and become true and obedient disciples of Jesus Christ himself. He instructed them on maintaining devotions, prayers, studies, and meditations on the Scriptures every day. While some hardcore Lutheran leaders objected to Bonhoeffer forming this group, Bonhoeffer felt that these young seminarians needed to go beyond theory and theology and learn how to genuinely live out their faith.
By the late 1930s, the Nazis had shut down the seminary and as the government imposed more and more laws and restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of religion Bonhoeffer's opportunities to serve grew less and less. They forbade him from teaching, and then from speaking publicly, and then from even writing a book on Psalms.
By 1939, Bonhoeffer decided to give up. He returned to the United States, where he could have lived out the rest of his life in peace. But only 26 days after arriving in the United States he turned back to Germany. "I made a mistake", he told his friends when he arrived back in his home country.
In Germany, Bonhoeffer continued to write, even though he was prohibited from publishing anything officially. But he was doing other things. He was involved in plans to save the lives of German Jews. And he looked for ways to get more actively involved in standing up for those who were persecuted. This led him to join the conspiracy against Hitler. While some may question his decision to join in the action against a nation's leader, for Bonhoeffer there was no other option. Faith was not just about believing, it was also about acting on those beliefs, no matter the consequences.
Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned in 1943 for his role in saving the lives of seven German Jews. Fifteen months later after a plot called "Valkyrie" attempted--and failed--to assassinate Hitler, Hitler in a rage ordered the arrest and torture of thousands whom he identified as in any way associated with the plot. Bonhoeffer's name was among those to be transferred to a maximum security prison. Even in the concentration camp he continued to study the word of God and to write.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on direct orders from Adolf Hitler, was executed on April 9, 1945 by hanging. Two weeks later, Allied forces marched into the camp and liberated it. Less than a week after that, Hitler cowardly committed suicide.
So why am I telling this story in a post that started talking about John and Diotrephes?
Let's think about what happened to the church in Germany? There was no dramatic takeover of the church by the forces of evil. Instead, corruption entered the church in a very slow and organic process. People who dissented were silenced. People who supported those who dissented were intimidated. But for the vast majority of worshipers, life went on. They still went to church every week. They still sat in pews and listened to sermons. What went on in the echelons of the church leadership was simply "not their business".
Even though I provided a disclaimer at the beginning of the post that I'm not comparing our church leaders with the Nazi party, there are going to be some of you who are thinking, "is he comparing our church leaders with the Nazi party?" And the answer again is, of course not. But what I am doing is challenging you to open your eyes and think honestly--is there anything that's crept into our church that shouldn't be there?
We've been conditioned not to question anything.
When we preach to people and they don't listen, we tell ourselves, "as long as we planted the seed we've done our duty. God has his time.". We don't question what it is about our message or our behavior that is getting in the way.
When we look at the number of members we have relative to every other church in the world, we tell ourselves "the remnant who will be saved will be few". We don't question whether we are driving away members almost as quickly as we are baptizing them.
When we suggest that our sermons are not reaching their audiences as effectively as other churches' sermons are, we're told, "yes, but those other churches are just preaching what their itching ears want to hear". We don't question whether there is room for us to improve in how we deliver our messages or how we choose those that deliver them.
As I said in an earlier post, all of these are excuses. They point the finger out and not in. They place judgment on everyone except ourselves.
Will our church survive? Only if one thing happens. Only if all the members of the church follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Only if we humble themselves and turn to God alone. Only if like Dietrich Bonhoeffer we do not stay silent in the face of evil, no matter what the evil and no matter what the cost.
As for what "evil" I'm talking about, that's not up to me to tell you. That's up to you to figure out. Again, not with your own brain power, but with deep and long prayer. You say you love the church. If you really do, you will pray for her life. So will I.
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