The Power and Danger of Rules

A friend recently asked me to state, in one word, what I thought could kill a movement. As I reflected on that, my mind went to Acts chapter 15, where the Jerusalem Council met and struck down the whole issue of circumcision. This isn’t about circumcision, but it is about rules.

That was my one word answer—“rules.” Rules that have outlived their original purpose.

I believe rules have their place—they have their time, and then they’re done. Too often, however, rules hang around long after their purpose has expired. Some were meant for a generation ago—or maybe thirty generations ago—and yet they still hold back the work of the Kingdom of God.

If we’re serious about doing the things God has really called us to do, we need to regularly take a hard look at our rules. Maybe once a year, reassess: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Should we keep doing it—or should we stop?

Lessons from the Jesus Movement

I came up during the Jesus Movement, and so much of what we did back then was considered off-limits by others—at least in their minds. The way people dressed, the simple fact that we served coffee after church—those things upset a whole bunch of people.

Then we got into a tangle with our denomination over something else. We had a 58-year-old aerospace engineer who volunteered his time as an associate pastor. This man had led very successful, large Bible studies in the region where we lived, and he was thrilled with what we were doing as a young church. He joined us wholeheartedly.

But I couldn’t get the denomination to give him a pastor’s license so he could officiate a wedding. I got into a heated argument over this with a wise denominational official. Eventually, he got them to change course and created an entirely new system for licensing pastors trained in local churches, not seminaries.

A New Generation Facing Old Rules

This brings me to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a very exciting young couple. I had met three men, all missionaries from Liberia to the United States, serving alongside their wives. All of them are church planters, and all hope to multiply more churches.

One of these men is married to an American woman who had been trafficked in the sex industry as a young girl. The remarkable thing is that these people are now doing short-term missions to Kenya, where they have met young girls caught in similar situations.

The big problem? Their denomination has a rule: no woman can be a pastor. And these young women in Kenya don’t trust men—for obvious reasons.

She wanted to start an online church for these girls.

I felt my role in this situation was to remind this brave young woman that she wasn’t hired by the denomination, and that she could choose to do what God was putting before her. I’m not sure where that’s all going to lead, but I have a strong feeling it’s going someplace good.

Once again, the rules in place have their reasons. I happen to disagree with this particular rule to some extent. But in the end, the rules aren’t the main issue—the young girls in need of a pastor are.

And if this young woman is able to shepherd them through WhatsApp and other social media platforms, then she should be free to do what God has clearly placed in her lap.

Balancing Submission and Speaking Up

We need to remain submitted to our leaders and their wisdom. But we also need to learn when to respectfully push back and to hope and pray that, like the men at the Jerusalem Council, our leaders will respond to genuine spiritual need the way those men did when Paul and Barnabas presented their case.

What About You and Me?

My point here isn’t really about them—or even about the people who seem to be blocking ministry efforts in Kenya. This is about you and me, and whether we’re willing to assess the rules and policies we’ve put in place over the years—and ask if they’ve outlived their usefulness.

In our church staff, we always made this kind of assessment during our annual planning meetings. We intentionally looked for ministries that had outlived their usefulness so we could shut them down or phase them out.

It would have been wise for us to do the same with our policy manual. Throughout the year, we developed policies based on decisions we made, and at the end of each year, we would try to harvest those decisions that seemed worthy of becoming formal policy.

But we never quite figured out that we should spend the same amount of time asking which existing policies had outlived their usefulness.