“80% of you are catholic and the other 20% are charismatic”.  I still remember the words as clear as day and I am taken back there.  It is 8am on a Wednesday morning.  I am sitting in a new lecture hall of Moore Theological College and I am outraged!  

I am the kind of first year college student that brings the bad reputation to the college: I know stuff.  I  can do second declension Greek nouns so I can rate myself as a theologian.  I am an evangelical student at an evangelical college studying to be an evangelical minister.  And now I am being accused of being catholic or charismatic?!  This is an an insult, it is an outrage.

The problem is that the person who made this declaration is Dr Graeme Goldsworthy who can trump all my qualifications by being everything I am as well as an evangelical faculty member of said college, not to mention a well known author and an incredibly humble and godly man.  But, isn’t he is meant to be one of us?  How could he make such a scandalous accusation?

As Graeme (we were told to address all the faculty members by their first names) made this declaration, I remember looking around at everyone else.  The lecture, on biblical theology, moved on as if nothing had happened.  Was no one else as outraged as I?  Why was no-one saying anything?   

Why was I not saying anything?  

As the years have gone on, I have reflected that Graeme is right.  Most of us are catholic.  In fact, I said nothing because I was catholic.  I do not mean that I was Roman Catholic; I wasn’t listening to the pope or worshipping Mary.  I mean I was functionally catholic: I had placed myself under the authority of the church, the community that is around me.  Just look at the reason for my silence when this accusation was made:  it was because no-one else said anything.  My silence proved Graeme right.

The thing is I am not alone.  As a culture, Australians are a highly pragmatic people.  This has leaked into ministry philosophy.   The first port of call of many gospel co-workers in my tribe, when faced with a problem, is not to open scripture or to pray, it is not to go to God.  Rather it is to ask “What are they [whoever is doing something in a similar field] doing?  Does that work?  Maybe I could do that?”  The authority is in the community.  

Graeme did also mention the other 20%.  There is a minority that place themselves under the authority of their own emotions and feelings.  “This feels right to me so I should do it.”  Whether or not this is an accurate depiction of the Charismatic movement, it was the way the word was used at the time.

Rescue From Functional Catholicism

As for me, how was I rescued from my functional catholicism?  God put people around me to slowly help me out of this.  Yes, I realise the irony here of God using the community I had put authority in to rescue me.  

There was one man, a little older than me.  He was not my boss, but we worked on a team together.  He kept forcing me to ask the question: Am I doing this because it is the latest fad of the thing that everyone else is doing?  Am I doing this because it seems to work?  He kept questioning my functional catholicism.

This man’s mantra was “think from first principles”.  He kept pushing me, and the team I was working with, to work out if what we were doing is from scripture.  It forced me to ask: what is God saying and how does that affect what I am doing here?  It forced me to move my authority from the community to God and his Word.

But I Work For Reach Australia…

Admittedly, practically speaking, you can’t do that with everything.   I am an employee of Reach Australia.  I work here because I think it is a way that God is changing out country.  But I know people think: “Reach Australia are the pragmatic people, they think they have all these practical methods that if you apply them your church will grow”. 

That quote is a myth.  That is not how the Reach Australia network thinks. Even if we did, there is no arsenal of silver bullet methods to make your church grow.  Only God will bring the growth (1 Cor 3:6).  What we do, at Reach Australia, is study how God works and help you see that there are things that can help church grow.  In fact, there are things that God has made you responsible for that will help the church grow (1 Cor 3:10-14).  Our job is to help gospel workers to do this the most effective way possible.

But this sounds or at lease smells like functional catholicism.  Even as I am writing this, I am forced to ask myself, have I become my own enemy?

First Principles

What does it mean to think from first principles, as my friend would remind me?  It means to start with a blank piece of paper and an open Bible, praying that God would give us wisdom and then thinking.  And we need to think hard.

As an example, take something like “preaching systematically through a book of the Bible”.  Where in the Bible does it tell us to do that?  The short answer is there is nowhere in the Bible that says we must preach exegetically through it.  But the nature of the Bible is such that it is all God’s word (2 Tim 3:16) and so we should not miss any of it.  Preaching systematically through a book of the Bible is a good way to make sure we are preaching all of it.  But it is not the only way.  Understanding the principle helps us understand the practice.

Practical Catholicism

Is the solution to think through everything from first principles?  On one hand it’s just not practically possible.  We don’t have the time to do all the work.  There are times when we need to just get on and do things.  Actually, this was a complaint we had with the co-worker I mentioned above.  We just didn’t have time to do that all the time.  This is especially true for people who are planting a church who need start everything from scratch.  

Further, God has given us the gift of his body, the church, to help each other through to work things through, to borrow ideas from and to inspire each other.  I am readily accepting that there is a practical catholicism in the life of ministry.  Provided that we see this for what it is, human servants helping other human servants in a divine work.  This is the role, at least partly, of the Reach Australia network.  In fact, this is why we are seen as a network and not an organisation. We help each other.  

The Solution to Functional Catholicism

But the solution to functional catholicism is to think from first principles.  At least to think of some of the things that we are doing from first principles.  We need to dig deep into God’s Word and understand what he is doing, what he is thinking and what his heart loves.  We need to reform ourselves from the way that the world thinks, what we have fallen into thinking from habits and what may have come from our functional catholicism.  We need to question our thought, our motives, our actions and our strategies against our theological understanding and convictions.

My maths teacher used to get us to do calculus by first principles.  For the non maths nerds among you, calculus can be done by a series of short cuts and patterns, but I won’t bore you with the details.  However, my maths teacher would make us do questions from time to time without being able to use those short cuts.  It was annoying and painful and the class would groan every time she put it on the board.  But it made us understand what the short cuts were doing and why they worked.  It also showed us where the limitations of the short cuts were.  This is exactly the same with ministry. 

As I have already mentioned, we cannot do this for everything all the time.  But we can do this for one thing at a time.  Just the habit of getting thinking through one thing will help us not just think about this one thing, but also set our minds to the mode of placing our thinking under the authority of God and his Word.  It will help us assess other ideas that others might have, rather than simply grabbing them and doing them because that is what everyone else is doing. 

Practically, my suggestion is pick one thing a week and ask questions.  Lot’s of questions: why do I think that?  What do I do that?  Is it from scripture or is it because I saw someone else I admire do that?  What does scripture have to say?  How does the pattern of the gospel change how I think?  If I was convicted I was right on this and everyone else thought I was wrong, would I change my mind?