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The Art of Dissection and High School Biology
If I ever had any aspirations of going into the field of medicine, High School Biology class dashed them to the wind. Now, mind you, I attended a little Public High School in rural Harford County, Maryland and so “state-of-the-art” was little more than a series of spelling words for us. Nevertheless, we had biology class and in biology class, we dissected dead animals.
Mind you, we didn’t get to dissect anything exotic. Our teacher was a fisherman by avocation and so most of what we dissected related to that hobby: worms, crawfish, small fish, etc… Needless to say, for a teenage boy having grown up in the Boy Scouts, dissecting critters like this was not a huge draw.
What made things worse was the fact that those were the days when pretty much every boy carried some sort of knife in his pocket to school, but the School Board did not trust us with scalpels to do the dissections. Instead, we were assigned this little, rounded scissors — kind of like what we had used for crafts back in Kindergarten — to dissect these animals.
I don’t know what the School Board members were thinking (probably about liability), but if you are unsure as to the results we got, Kindergarten shears do not serve the budding biologist well in this task. I remember looking at all of the diagrams in our biology book, depicting what we were supposed to be seeing and all I remember ever seeing was mush. There is a rule of thumb principle in this — imprecise tools in the hands of a novice does not yield precision in any meaningful sense of the word.
So, why the recollection about High School Biology? In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul gives us one of the great analogies of the church — that of the body of Christ. Not all are eyes or hands but both eyes and hands are needed. You know the language. Yet, often, when pastors and theologians handle this idea and apply it to the church, I think that they handle it much like we handled dissection with Kindergarten shears. They make a mess and the body of Christ ends up looking like all the same stuff: mush.
Let me offer an example. In many denominations, if someone is identified as having a call to serve on the missions field or perhaps to go and plant a new church for the denomination, they are sent out to start raising money. True, the benefit to that model is that by the time the man is in the field, he has developed a large network of churches and Christians to help pray for and support his work — though most often, those churches and Christians are not anywhere near the field in which the man is working. Furthermore, it makes the assumption that the calling to be an evangelist brings with it the gift of being a fund-raiser. And the two do not necessarily go hand in glove.
A better model would be to say that if the church identifies a man as having the calling to serve as an evangelist, the church should send him and let him commit fully to said work while assigning the task to others in the body (who have a gift for and love of fund-raising) the task of making sure the evangelist’s financial needs are met. Different parts of the body have different roles, tasks, and giftings so that the whole body can function effectively.
It is true that we are fed by one Spirit and that we have one head in Christ Jesus. And so, there are some things that the whole body shares in common — a circulatory system and a nervous system, for example. Thus, there are things that the whole body does together. We gather for public worship, we commit time to prayer, and we study our Bibles. But, when it comes to the good works that we are called to do, we are most effective doing those works for which God has designed us. Not everyone is called to teach, but we need teachers. Not everyone is called to labor in mercy ministry, but we need those who do. Not everyone is called to organize events, but if we are going to put on an event of sorts, we need people to organize them. Not everyone is called to raise funds for projects, but we need people who raise funds. Not everyone is called to be at every mid-week prayer meeting, but they are good and healthy for the body (think of them like a vitamin tablet!). And, when you assume that every believer should be involved in every area of the work of the church (as many do), then you are making mush of the body with those kindergarten shears once again — rather than seeing the beauty of God’s design in the elegant complexity of the body.
Here’s the trick though. Each part of the body needs to be committed to a common end and each part of the body needs to trust the other parts of the body to act and work in the way in which they were designed. Just as in the human body, parts do not act autonomously, so too, all is meant to work under the headship of Christ that is expressed through the teaching of the Word of God and is moderated by the oversight of the Elders. Yet, the hand can do best what the hand was made to do and the other parts likewise.
And so, leadership in the body is not simply a matter of maintaining systems (your body can be physically healthy but your person can still remain utterly unproductive). Leadership is about equipping hands to be hands and eyes to be eyes and knees to be knees — and then letting those parts function at their full capacity (getting out of their way) so that the body as a whole can achieve its God-given mission of making disciples of the nations and being a buttress and pillar of the truth.
Now, part of Paul’s analogy is the principle that when one part of the body is hurting or in need, then other parts compensate. I stand amazed, for example, at people who have learned to do with their feet what most of us commonly do with our hands, and vice versa. Having had a stroke several years back where my left hand no longer wanted to work right, I had to learn to compensate and then to retrain my brain to make my hand work like it was supposed to do. And thus, in the church, sometimes we step out of our normal areas to assist the whole body in its time of need, but that too, only happens when the body is committed to a common end.
And so, we have a choice, as we look at the church, the body of Christ, we can lump all of the gifts together, dissecting the body with kindergarten shears (and ending up with a gooey mess) or you can expose the elegant diversity of God’s design for the church, celebrating the diverse gifts while knowing that all of those gifts came from one Spirit who calls us to serve to one end — the building of Christ’s kingdom.
There’s Something Missing from Our Conversation on the Body
In 1 Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul makes an impassioned plea for the unity of the body…a unity that can only built up in love, when the body itself is functioning properly (Ephesians 4:16). Love in the body is indeed the “better way” (1 Corinthians 12:31) toward which we should strive. To make his point, Paul reminds us that a body has many parts…there are eyes and hands and ears, etc… Because the body needs all of the parts to be whole, unity is that which must be striven for. Amen. For most of us who have grown up in Christian circles or in churches, this is an idea that is pretty basic to our existence. No matter what our personal gifts and passions may be, we need the whole to live out the Great Commission in this world.
I fear, though, in a society that has become as specialized as ours has become, Paul’s analogy is often misapplied. In today’s world, it seems, that there are specialists in just about every field. Medicine, Law, and Mechanics are all examples of areas where people specialize in a narrow field. Certainly, there is a base of knowledge that all specialists share in common (I’ll come back to that idea), but there are Dermatologists, Hematologists, and Cardiologists; there those who specialize in Criminal Law, Civil Law, and Business Law; and people also specialize in Motorcycle Mechanics, Heavy Machinery Mechanics, and Auto Mechanics — many even specializing only one a particular make of automobiles.
Even in my former trade there were specialists (I installed carpet for 11 years before entering the ministry full-time). My specialty was Residential Flooring and in that, I did a lot of custom work (borders, inlays, etc…). For several months, just after arriving in seminary, I worked for a Commercial Flooring company, laying tile and glue-down floors. While I knew the basics, the guys who did that kind of flooring for a living could work circles around me. At the same time, most of them had never used a carpet kicker before…something that is a mainstay of residential work. We were specialists — we had areas in which we overlapped, but there were things in which we each did particularly well, and it is in those areas that we each tended to stay.
So, how does this apply to the church? Certainly, there are specializations in the church. To some, God has given the gift of administration, and we need those who can wisely manage the resources that God has entrusted to the church. To others, God has given the gift of helping, which extends well past the work of the Deacons to the whole church body, who cares enough to reach out and meet the needs of others (as I write this, we have a team of people traveling home from Houston, who spent the last week doing just that). To others, God gives the gift of teaching, something that is essential in the process of discipling Christians as they grow in faith. Still, to others, God has given a heart for evangelism, and these members are wired by God to look for people with whom they can share the Gospel. All of these are specializations — we share a common basic set of skills (every Christian ought to be able to share the Gospel, but some are that much more zealous for it, etc…). And again, Paul’s analogy carries, we all are not gifted in the same way and so we need one another.
At the same time, there are things in the life of the body that keep the whole body healthy. For example, as I am closing in on 50, my family doctor has insisted that I start taking vitamins and be more intentional about daily exercise. And so, I take my “One-a-Day” and I ride my stationary bike 5 miles (or walk a mile) pretty much every day (pretty much, life gets busy). These actions do not just benefit my stomach or my heart, they benefit every part of my body, helping it to be more healthy overall. Further, I pray and spend time reading and reflecting on God’s Word, every day. This again, benefits my whole being.
Likewise, in the life of the Church, there are things that we do that benefit the whole body — they act like vitamins for our soul. Spending time reading and reflecting on the Bible is not an activity that belongs just to the specialist, every part of the body must engage in this to keep the body well. Some often say that they are not good at prayer. Of course, if you can talk or think, you can pray and it again is an essential part of the Christian life, something not reserved for a specialist. Sometimes people say that they don’t really need Sunday School, but being discipled is again something that is to be a part of every Christian’s life and without a commitment to discipleship (personal and corporate), the body will not be healthy. They are exercises and vitamins for our overall health. True, my ears may not directly benefit from time on a stationary bike, but that time strengthens my heart which circulates blood all over my body, which in turn not only helps the blood flow to the ears, but it improves the health of the body to which my ears are attached. And so, they benefit indirectly, but they benefit nonetheless.
Sometimes Christians think that they don’t need corporate worship. Here, the analogy changes a little bit because our worship is not so much something we do to strengthen our body (though our body is strengthened as a by-product), it is our service to God. Our worship is our drawing near to our Almighty God and Savior according to His Word and giving him the praise and honor for who he is and for what he has done. This is a big part of what the church was created to do.
So, to say that you don’t need to worship as part of the church body is really to say that you are not part of the body at all. You exist, perhaps, in connection with the body for your own reasons, but that is to be like a parasite, not a functioning organ. Jesus speaks of this as well when he describes the church growing like a large tree from a small seed (see Mark 4:30-32). Once the tree (the Kingdom/Church) has grown and developed branches and leaves, the birds of the air (which often represent the unbelieving nations), make their nests in the midst of the tree. The birds benefit from the tree’s presence, but are not part of the tree and are not fed by the root of the tree. And, they will only nest in the branches of the tree for a season. Worship — being fed by the tap-root of the Spirit — drawing near according to the Word — is what distinguishes the tree from the bird in its nest.
Thus, in things like worship, the study of God’s word, and prayer, it is not a matter of specializing. It is a matter of being and being healthy. What is the goal of this healthy living? It is being united and built up in love. How is this love achieved? It is achieved through the growing mature in our doctrine so that we are not blown to and fro by the winds of human cunning and deceit (see Ephesians 4:13-16). This cannot happen apart from the whole body attending to the Word of God. Yes, we specialize, but we are also a part of a whole. To understand Paul’s analogy in 1 Corinthians 12, you need to preserve this balance…how often, though, we miss the second while over-emphasizing the first.
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