She called and asked if I’d like to look through her father’s library since she needed to empty the house. I found some old classics, and a book by Millard Fuller that I thought was unavailable. Fuller established Habitat for Humanity after his time at Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia. Koinonia was founded by Clarence Jordan as a Christian interracial commune in 1942. The farm community faced threats, boycotts and drive-by shootings, but yet exists.
Fuller told a story and added more detail than I’d seen before.
An Indian student visited Koinonia and Jordan invited him to attend church on Sunday. However, ushers turned the student away because of his race. A few days later the deacons announced to Jordan that they were revoking his membership. At a special board meeting, Jordan handed his Bible to a deacon, asking for a biblical understanding of their actions. The first deacon handed it to the second, and then to the third and then to the fourth. No man could cite biblical guidance. The men could only respond that their church was for white Christians only.
Jordan told Fuller that some churches weren’t churches, but only “God boxes.”
“A group of people get together, erect a building, write up some rules about the kind of God they want to live there, and then invite him in,” he said. “The trouble is, he doesn’t. A house of God cannot be operated by any rules but God’s rules.”
As a son of the South, I remember being in some churches like this one that excluded people. I was once brave enough to preach from the pulpit about Judgment Day.
“Can you imagine standing before God on that day and him asking us what we did for his kingdom?” I asked. “And you’d say, ‘Lord, I stood in the door and kept certain people out of your church!’”
I’ve not always been this brave, but have often been foolish!
But a “God box” might also speak to other issues. What about worship traditions or sanctuary décor? Or so many of the things we do “because we’ve always done them”? Richard Blackaby said it’s amazing that dying churches often have full calendars. They do so many things that don’t seem to be supporting the true ministry of the church.
If it’s the church of the living God rather than a “God box,” then we must come before the Lord every Sunday with humility, asking him to use our feeble efforts and to visit us with his Holy Spirit.
The Bible declares the church is the body of Christ and he is the head.
We can ill afford to put the Lord of the church in a box.
