Ministry Monday: Corporate Sin

A cursory look at the Scriptures reveals that sin is not only something committed by individual men and women, but by groups as well — the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 serving as its early paradigm. Even the secular political world today acknowledges and has strategies to deal with the corporate guilt of businesses, organisations, and institutions.

But I wonder whether in ministry we are so focussed on congregation members’ (and our own) sin as individuals that we might occasionally be blindsided by our sin as a church?

When, in confession, we either privately or orally supply examples of the ‘manifold sins and wickedness’ from which ‘we earnestly repent,’ we very seldom try to think of the areas in which we as a body have offended God by thought, word, and deed. Even when we recognise — and try to remedy — the rampant individualism of Christian life in the modern West that is quite alien to the mind of the biblical authors, our emphasis will be on the corporate identity of our salvation and mission; rarely on the communal dimension of our continuing sin, guilt, folly and weakness.

Though we’ll occasionally teach the federal guilt of humanity ‘in Adam’, in terms of sin and guilt, we are tempted to go straight from ‘the whole human race’ to individuals, as if there is no collective identity (family, church, nation) capable of sin in-between.

It is vital that we acknowledge that churches can sin so that we can lead our churches in repentance and restoration. Isn’t that what Jesus desired as he wrote to the Angels (bishops?!) of the churches in Revelation?

I’m pondering these things now, because in a recent church leaders’ meeting I saw my own participation in church sin.

A brief word of background: I’m at the smaller of the churches in a three-church parish. The mother church supplies money, resources, staff, and volunteers without which we could not, at the moment, continue as we are. The mother church also provides the preaching rota and Sunday School materials, hosts the major events, sets the tone of sung worship and dominates the PCC.

In this meeting, we were discussing what kind of relationship mother and daughter should have moving forward — a big picture question of identity and strategy: are we one church in three locations (so we should work out how to integrate more), or three churches sharing a common vision (so we should work out how to devolve more)? It is a good and important question which others in team situations will have wrestled with. It is a question that we rightly continue to try to work out the answer to.

But at one point in the discussion that morning it suddenly became clear to me what we — the smaller church, acting through her leaders — were in effect preparing to say to the bigger church: “We want your gifts — but we don’t want you.” This, of course, is pretty much the Sunday School definition of the sinful posture of mankind to his maker. We wanted the bigger church’s money, resources and people — but we didn’t want to be accountable to them or led by them.

Recognizing (and repenting of) this corporate sinful attitude that morning helped us to move towards more spiritually mature expectations and designs. But it has also left me determined better to look out for sinful groupthink in our churches, and in our groupings. Let’s pray that God would make these clear to us, and that he would grant us repentance.