Damascus Road Church

I wonder sometimes if consumerism is unavoidable.  People walk into your church, "check out the show", and walk out without ever asking a question or shaking a hand.  Usually, their 50 minute-or-less evaluation includes an assessment of the people (are they fat, ugly, nicely dressed, rough, clean, uptight, etc.), the music (can I sing to it, is there a pipe organ, is that a secular song?, that music guy is not my style, etc), the preaching (where is the Christian advice, can he speak, do they open the bible, does it convict, does it comfort, does it put me to sleep?) and anything else that might say something about who we are, ads, other activities, color of your chairs, shape of your buildings, etc. 

When said visitor doesn't like or disagrees with something, these well seasoned expert-church-hoppers will take the time to tell you why they don't like it.  Of course, they won't say they don't like it, they'll through out terms like unbiblical, not like the New Testament church,even immoral...yada, yada, yada.  I believe that at the core of their complaint is a misunderstanding of the Scriptures, specifically, they fail to discern between descriptive and prescriptive passages of Scripture. 

Descriptive passages are passages of Scripture that describe a situation or an example of A WAY to do something; they provide facts not necessarily commands.  These passages are often called "historical" in nature in that they report what has occurred in the past.  These passages tell us something that happened, but they do not necessarily apply to all of us. For example, the bible tells of tells of King David's adultery and act of murder, but we are not expected to follow this example, but learn from it.  The same goes with miracles--we cannot expect the same necessarily to happen to us.  We could also argue that the Psalms, especially the emotional content and specific structure of David's Psalms, are just the way he did it...not necessarily how we are supposed to.

Prescripitive passages are those passages of the Bible that in fact prescribe something to be done or not done--they call us to action.  These passages are often called "normative" in that the activity is prescribed in such a way as to be understood in universal application.  Examples would be DO NOT murder, DO NOT lie, WORSHIP the Lord alone, etc.  Prescriptive laws can be obeyed or disobeyed, kept or broken.  There are also prescriptive behaviors either explicit or implied such as a weekly gathering of the church.  That the church must gather is prescriptive but how, when, and where is descriptive.

A problem occurs when people CONFUSE descriptive things in the Bible with prescriptive ones.  Some people take a prescriptive passage like "homosexuality is wrong" and make it descriptive by suggesting it was just a "cultural" thing of the time.  Others take descriptive passages like the Pslams of David sung with a lyre and flute and declare that we must sing only Psalms of the Bible as worship and in same way David did.  Both are wrong. 

These are the dangerous tools of the critical consumer.  The apostle Paul asks in Galatians 1, "Am I concerned now with the approval of men or the approval of God."  Let us never compromise what we know to be true for the approval of men.  And let us never let men twist the Scripture to alter what "they say" God approves.