“The Church Is Divided By Gifts”

“The church is divided by gifts,” observed Pastor Donald Rayno as we  were finishing up our Chili burritos.

Don has served as director of the Raleigh-Area Concert of Prayer for twenty years. He has lunched with pastors of all traditions, Presbyterian to Pentecostal and everything in between. He has organized countless prayer meetings balancing the different ways congregations pray: silently, charismatically, liturgically, extemporarily. I was intrigued by his distillation,”What do you mean?”

“The charismatic churches emphasize the gifts of tongue and interpretation, the mainline churches, like your Presbyterian church, emphasize the gifts of teaching.” Suddenly the denominations of the church made sense, tragic sense.

“But isn’t that sad,” I replied, “Paul teaches Christ gave us gifts for the building up of the church but we have turned them to it’s very opposite? Using them to divide the church?”

here is one Lord,
one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of all,
who is over all, in all,
and living through all.
-Ephesians 4:5-6

In Ephesians 4, Paul declares the church united, grounded on our “One Lord, one Faith, One Baptism.” If we are one, then, why are we so different? How do we account for the variety in the Church? Paul’s answer: the gifts of Christ make us different.

It is a brilliant theological insight. We are all the same because we are saved by One Lord. We are all different because there are many gifts from our One Lord. By rooting our differences to the gifting of Christ, it removes a rational for making differentiations a reason for discriminations. Most societies connect differences to birthrights. Some are born to rule, some are born to be ruled. But now, differences can be explained by the gifting of Christ. As such, gifts are not our birthrights to flaunt but Christ’s accomplishment. There is no hierarchy in our differences — no gift is better than another.

But what was meant for differentiation has become means of division. Somehow, the church took this teaching but still ordered the gifts, discriminating the orthodox from the heterodox.