Pastor Tim,
In our state, our governor – to date – has not issued any executive decree stating that we cannot gather. However, the decision seems to be imminent. And even though we don’t have any formal decree from our civil authority to decide whether or not to submit to right now, we do have the CDC’s “recommendations,” and above all that, we have also our general desire to love and care for one another as a body.
As I think about how our own elders will weigh this scenario, this sentence from the letter your session recently sent to your church struck me,
In the end, we became convinced we should remove the weight of that decision from the congregation and bear that weight ourselves.
The more I think about what’s being conveyed there, the more I appreciate it. I’ve come to appreciate more over the last few years that one of the roles that authority plays in our lives is giving us the freedom to simply stop worrying about a lot of stuff. This does not mean that we abdicate our own consciences or anything, but it does give us the freedom to prayerfully and humbly leave in God’s hands the things that we aren’t responsible for.
It does prompt me to wonder, though, how things would have looked had the elders made the decision to continue having services against the decree of the civil authority. At that point, the congregation would now have to weigh two competing authorities. Do we obey the elders, or do we obey the governor? And some elders are putting their congregations in that scenario right now.
These types of conundrums are where I find the topic of authority to become vexing. When you have two legitimate authorities in your life demanding mutually exclusive obedience, it’s not always simple to decide who to obey. Fortunately, in many cases in life, authority is hierarchical, which helps a lot. We know that our manager trumps our supervisor, and that our director trumps our manager. We know that the lieutenant trumps the sergeant, and so forth. Most of us will even recognize that dad trumps mom.
So when the elders of your church say we should meet, and the governor says we may not meet, what is a churchman left to do? These two authorities do not possess a clean, hierarchical relationship (at least not in our day), so it isn’t a simple decision of hearkening to the greater.
Is it right to say that in such a situation, a man is left to his own authority to decide which authority to obey? And I say “his own authority” not to say that he is permitted to just throw off the bonds of either of those two authorities altogether. Rather, I mean that a man is left to make a decision, in good conscience, with sober judgment, with faith in a sovereign God, and with a heart that earnestly desires to submit to both authorities.
What would you say to those who may find themselves in such a predicament very soon?
Thanks,
EDIT: Wouldn’t you know it! Just as I was writing this, our governor issued a State of Public Health Disaster Emergency, thus prohibiting our gatherings. 