This was in the age of worksheets (my apologies to those students), when we somehow thought it was a good idea to give kids a stack of worksheets at the beginning of class and help them work through them.
(Students for whom school is easy can work through a stack of virtually anything; I know, sadly, that those for whom school seems insurmountable, we were just adding to their mountain of hopelessness and despair.)
Our rations were delivered to our classroom, and we took our own paper with us to the copier, protective of every sheet. Unbeknownst to the principal, the secretary would open a pack of paper for her own work and leave it conspicuously on the shelf by the copier.
And we would steal. Just a tiny speck, not the whole pack, of course. Our proprietary spirit, the one that guards what is ours, would kick into motion.
That same spirit activates when someone tells us about their doctor or their diet or their child-rearing method. We want to come back with that which is ours--our doctor, our diet, our child-rearing method.
And so it is with our church. Its leader, its worship style, its children's programming--all somehow more right...except that, they are not.
A proprietary spirit guards what is ours, including our opinion. At the most inopportune time, this spirit launches us into believing that our opinion is best, when, in fact, it is just an opinion.
A local church who seeks God's agenda is simply part of the greater Church, the one over which Jesus gave us charge before He left His stint on earth.
When we busy ourselves indulging our opinion that we are somehow better, stronger, and more in line with what God wants, we are giving voice to that proprietary spirit, and building an invisible barrier to complete sharing of mission and resources with other churches.
We steal. Not the whole mission, of course, just a tiny speck of it.
It never occurred to us to share our copy paper; may the mission of Christ fare better.
Tomorrow: where the root system begins.
