The Christian Project
June 13, 2021
Churches of Christ have many strengths. One of them is our recognition that, when a bunch of sinful people get together and start putting down regulations, the result is a set of sinful regulations that inhibit our service to God. This is why we’ve always avoided denominational structures, even as we still function as a sort of denomination.
This idea is more biblical than sometimes we have seen. It explicitly recognizes the role of individual sin, and the ability of individual sins to corrupt whatever the individual sinner touches. That is an important recognition, but also a terribly limited vision of sin.
Perhaps the idea of synergy is helpful here—the idea that when people get together, the result is greater than the sum of their individual inputs: 1+1=3. A single cord may be easily broken, but put three of them together and you have a significant rope, one far stronger than the sum of the individual tensile strengths of the cords.
The same is true for sin. When you get a bunch of individual sinners together working on a project, the sum of the sinfulness of the work may take on a whole new life of its own. What may have started as a bunch of little sins, becomes one big Sin, synergy gone awry.
Alas, this effect is not limited to the church. In Genesis 3 we see the cursing of the earth due to Adam’s eating of the fruit. The poisoning of all of creation seeps into most every human project—cultures, bureaucracies, legal codes—even those of America.
What, then, is the solution? Libertarianism? Anarchy? Demolish all large human endeavors, refusing to give Sin a foothold anywhere?
Alas, wherever you find a school of thought, Sin is already there. A school of thought is, by its very nature, a product of human thought. Sin has already corrupted it.
The solution is not fleeing from every human endeavor, but choosing which endeavor to flee towards. Flee towards the one begun by, empowered by, protected by, the one true king, Jesus. Embrace his culture. Embrace his bureaucracy. Embrace his legal code. Sin has no foothold there. We will bring our individual sins with us, but his light will reveal them and destroy them if we will let him. From this safe haven we are able to look at the world afresh and see the effects of Sin permeating and polluting everything. And as we live in this alternative kingdom, we are able to offer the world a legitimate alternative to the brokenness they are subjected to. Offering this alternative is the Christian project.
—John Coffey
