NARCISSISM IN THE CHURCH & THE BIBLICAL ANSWER

A narcissistic church may be Catholic or Protestant, but the characteristics will be, to one degree or another, the same. For example, a narcissistic church will be in love with itself. A narcissistic church will be in love with its order, liturgy, tradition and ceremony. A narcissistic church will consider it institutional apparatus and program to be Divine and unchangeable. A narcissistic church will judge a person’s relationship with God by their loyalty to the church itself.  Instead of functioning as a means of drawing people to Christ, a narcissistic church becomes an end and seeks to draw people to itself.

The truth is that there is no Divine church order laid down in the New Testament. The church of the New Testament was a messianic movement that relied on the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit for its life, community and mission, rather than organizational structure. Leadership was functional in nature and leaders saw themselves as called by the risen Christ to “serve” His people.

Organizational structure in the New Testament tended to be practical, temporal and task oriented. In the first century, organizational order and structure were means for advancing the gospel and facilitating the work of the Spirit, not ends in themselves to be sought and guarded. Church organization changed from place to place and in the same place at different times. In his classic work, The Primitive Church, Oxford Professor, Burnett Streeter, wrote,

Whatever else is disputable, there is, I submit, one result from which there is no escape. In the primitive church there was no single system of church order laid down by the apostles. During the first hundred years of Christianity, the Church was an organism alive and growing—changing its organization to meet changing needs. Uniformity was a later development (Hyatt, Apostolic Leadership, 36).

It is obvious that the New Testament writers show little or no interest in order and structure for their own sake. When they do comment on structure it is to describe rather than prescribe, and what they describe varies from church to church. Commenting on this diversity, New Testament scholar, the late Dr. Gordon Fee, wrote, “This is hardly the stuff from which one can argue with confidence as to how the early church was organized—or whether it was! (Hyatt, Apostolic Leadership, 38).

Instead of being obsessed with a certain ritual or order, the New Testament Church was centered on a Message—the Message of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, risen and ascended on high. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminded them of this focus when he first arrived in their pagan, idolatrous city. He wrote,

And I, brethren, when I came to you did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified
(I Corinthians 2:1-2).

The Church today, both Catholic and Protestant, needs a Jesus Revolution in which the emphasis and focus is shifted from ourselves and back to Jesus. C. S. Lewis summed it up well when he wrote,

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men to Christ, to make them little christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time (Hyatt, Apostolic Leadership, 112).

This article was derived from Dr. Eddie Hyatt's book, Apostolic Leadership, available from Amazon and his website at http://eddiehyatt.com.