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Guest Column
One of my favorite cartoons shows a man talking to some friends at a cocktail party saying, “I don’t belong to an organized religion. My religious beliefs are way too disorganized.” It is increasingly common today to hear the cliché, “I don’t believe in organized religion.” This generally indicates a lack of any religious commitment or participation, or even a hostility to organized religion.
It is true that not all organized religion is good. Nonetheless, it is clear from the New Testament that St. Paul viewed Christianity as an organized, orderly religion. God planned our salvation through Christ before the world was even created (Ephesians 1:4), so no matter how disorderly sin has made this world, God has organized a way for things to be set right again!
At just the right time, “God … obtained the church with His own blood” (Acts 20:28). This is an amazing passage. Jesus tells us that God is spirit (John 4:24), so how could He have blood? In Jesus Christ, God the Son took up flesh to dwell among us, to fulfill God’s Law, and to suffer and die for the sins of the world. As each Christian should confess of Jesus, “He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.”
This is why St. Paul begins his Epistles with words such as, “Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.” Grace is God’s favorable attitude toward us sinners, and peace is what He accomplishes through the shed blood of Jesus on the cross. And God has ordered that all who have been baptized into Jesus Christ live under His grace and peace!
Now we get to another aspect of the “organized” part of the Christian religion. Paul says to Titus, “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you” (Titus 1:5). Crete is a pretty big island, larger than both Delaware and Rhode Island; it is currently part of Greece and home to 630,000 residents. No doubt the population was much less in Paul and Titus’ day, but what is notable is that there were many, many towns on the island of Crete in Paul and Titus’ day, so Titus had a big task in organizing Christian churches on that island.
Paul uses Greek military language to describe his relationship with Titus. He says, “put what remained in order … as I directed you.” When you envision military drills, the first word that comes to mind is “orderly,” right? Paul was commissioned by Jesus Christ Himself to put the church’s affairs in order, and now Paul is delegating that responsibility to Titus for the island of Crete. And how does he do this? Paul says that Titus is “to appoint elders in every town.” This term translated as “elders” is the same one used in Greek for both older men in the community as well as ambassadors. In that time, elders were respected, and the purpose of an ambassador was to communicate the will of a sovereign to another group. So the ambassadors of Christ are those who are supposed to communicate His Word and will to sinners.
In a certain sense, all of us are ambassadors for Christ. We all are to share the Gospel of Christ as the opportunity arises in our vocations. But in Titus 1, clearly St. Paul has in mind an ordained ministry, a pastoral office, when he speaks of Titus appointing elders or ambassadors in every town.
So there is an order, an organization within the Christian Church. There are preachers and hearers, pastors and laypeople. This is a divinely ordered fact, organized religion from God Himself. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with God Himself.
But what people tend to misunderstand is that the entire point of the pastoral office is to serve and defend the Christian church, not to rule over it as despots. Our world is obsessed with management, with leadership, with power, but the pastoral office is narrowly focused on the administration of God’s Word and Sacraments. It is not a position of domination (Luke 22:25).
When Paul told Titus to make sure that there was organized religion on Crete, to put the churches in each town in order by appointing faithful pastors, the sole purpose was to make sure that Jesus Christ crucified and risen for our forgiveness and justification would always be the central message of the church. The purpose of the pastoral office is to ensure that the Word of Truth given in the Bible is revered and believed as the very word of God, that the message of Jesus Christ as our 100% Savior from sin, from death, from hell would be proclaimed, and that Christians are assured that they are forgiven, saved, and heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
Rev. Roth pastors Grace Lutheran Church in Elgin.
