Unruly people or the Holy Spirit, your church is not big enough for both.

I Thessalonians 5:12-22

We have often treated this passage as a string of individual behaviors that Paul has listed as a sort of good deeds to do list. This is misguided and misses the power of this passage. Having addressed mistaken eschatology and the busy bodies that were its carriers, Paul calls for some practical Church leadership to address the conflict and set those individuals to right that would cause conflict. Never doubt that correcting misguided people has the potential to cause them to turn the misguided into clergy killers.

Paul begins by commanding support for those who are leading the church.  He makes the point in v. 12 that these leaders are to give instruction.  This word is more than simply teaching.  It is about setting in order the muddled thinking of certain people.  When this is done the muddle-headed individual may become unruly. Paul says they are to be admonished.  This word means, “to keep military order”.  The point of Paul’s using a word with a military origin is that this is no matter of want-to or cooperation, but rather order and submission to authority.  Verse 14 is a study in the problem of the American church in the early 21^st century.  When faced with the unruly, church leaders are often weak and fainthearted.  The weak are severely tempted to give in to secure peace at any price with those who are being unruly.  The fainthearted (the word literally means “little soul”) lack the conviction to stand firm by their principles.  We often misunderstand the role of patience when dealing with church discipline problems.  Patience is not endlessly putting up with the non-sense of the unruly or dysfunctional person, it is rather, sticking to doing what is right regardless of what is involved.  Patience is holding faithfully to the right course of action and enduring the grief that comes from doing the right thing.  But Paul also warns against an over reaction in which evil is done to the unruly or disruptive person. 

Dealing with this kind of dysfunction is not easy, but if we are faithful in the hardship we can remain positive at our core.  The advice and behavior described in vs. 16-18 will keep the leaders from despair in the difficult times.  As long as a leader has some sense of hope for the future and mission of the church he can have remarkable durability.  That sense of hope is enhanced and encouraged by rejoicing, praying and giving thanks.  Ministers do not usually leave the church and the ministry because they have lost faith in God, Scripture or the Kingdom.  They do so for good reason; they have lost hope in the local congregations. 

They have had dysfunctional crazies in the church attack them and the leadership that is called to guard the flock decides it is easier to get a new preacher than deal with the unruly member.  So, the preacher becomes discouraged and leaves.  But the preacher is not the only one.  The grammar of verse 19 is very clear, translated literally Paul says, “Stop quenching the Spirit.”  Allowing the unruly to be disrespectful of the leaders and to misbehave without accountability causes the Spirit to withdraw from the life and ministry of the church.  If you talk to a minister that has been through an ugly church fight he can very likely tell you of sensing the distinct absence of the Holy Spirit at some point.  If a church does this enough times eventually it will die.  By the way, have you noticed how many churches are closing across our nation?

In verse 20 Paul wisely strikes a balance.  During a church conflict people will sometimes or often say, “I believe the Lord is leading us to….”  Paul warned not to reject such statements out of hand.  The Lord may in fact be leading.  Rather than believe everyone who says the Lord gave him or her direction or, equally bad, missing the genuine guidance of the Spirit, Paul commands that we “examine everything”.  The word is taken from testing metal to see if it is precious or common. One way of putting it is, “Is this advice golden or is it just cheap tin?”   Paul advises to hang on to the good.  He used the word for beautiful or comely and rejected in dynamic terms the evil (the root word from which we get the word porn).  The bad advice of the unruly is as bad for the church as is pornography. 

In the church you can have the unruly person, the clergy killer, or you can have the Holy Spirit, but you can never have both.