COMMENTARY: For Christians, It’s Usually About Control, and It Shouldn’t Be

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Until recently, the most effective stewardship talk I had heard took place in California, where a preacher said the heart of stewardship is breaking our “addiction to control.” Too often, he said, our primary goal in life is to gain control, or to nourish the illusion of control, with […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Until recently, the most effective stewardship talk I had heard took place in California, where a preacher said the heart of stewardship is breaking our “addiction to control.” Too often, he said, our primary goal in life is to gain control, or to nourish the illusion of control, with wealth as the No. 1 enabler.

Then I heard an even better stewardship talk. The speaker was a tall woman whom I first noticed the day she heard someone shouting from a back pew that her husband was having an attack, and she strode quickly from the choir’s alto section down the side aisle, and used her skills as a physician to keep the man stable until an ambulance arrived.


Standing now at the lectern, she kept it simple. Years ago, she said, she made some poor personal decisions and almost lost everything, but her church stood by her, and now she knew wholeness.

There it was: human frailty, consequences, mercy, redemption. Forget religion’s pretentious bickering about doctrine, sexuality and governance. Here was the gospel: sin and redemption. Here was grace: a faith community that loved a pilgrim across the wilderness. And here, I now understood, was why she strode into action as a healer: She was giving back.

I yearn for the day when we Christians stop fighting about control issues, and start doing what Jesus called us to do. We are so concerned about controlling how people behave that we forget to love them as they are. We are so concerned about doctrinal cleansing, ethical cleansing and political cleansing that we fail to see the logs in our own eyes, and even more, we fail to give what God gives, namely mercy. We are so concerned about whom to keep out that we fail to let hope and forgiveness in.

In our concern for fiscal tidiness, denominational victory, ordination privileges and liturgical correctness, we wear ourselves out and have too little energy for serving. In our sniping and snapping, we shred the bonds of trust. In our warring and wariness, we tend to see categories, not persons; we see threats, not needs; we wonder how harshly to judge, not how lavishly to love. In our zeal for safety and comfort, we refuse to die to self.

We need to get out of our heads, out of our safe places, out of our concern for winning, out of our propriety and self-righteousness, and we need to hear a fellow pilgrim say, I once was lost, but now am found, and what we do here makes all the difference in the world.

I yearn for the day when we care more about making that difference than about getting our way. More about listening than speaking. More about being one than being right.

I yearn for the day when we set aside our 2,000-year quest to be like Caesar and instead accept ourselves as the beloved and flawed whom God knows us to be. No more presuming to judge and to rule, no more guarding the gates of salvation, no more “holy war.” Instead, receive the humbler bread that God serves: mercy, acceptance, redemption, grace and hope.


Sunday, when the speaker returned to the alto section, I was glad that we in the choir had already performed our anthem. I don’t think I could have sung. For she had just put into simple words the reasons why I am in church.

I have other places that I could be, other ways to get my needs met, but here, in this community of the flawed and generous, I am gently and persistently reminded that life isn’t about me, that giving matters more than getting, and that when I fall, God’s people will pick me up.

MO/PH END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Tom Ehrich, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

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