26 Paula,

You said:

There is only one Head to give orders to the parts of the Body, and none of us are it.

I know a pastor who says that he is the “covenantal head of the church”. I asked him to show me this from the scriptures and he has not yet been able to do that. I asked several pastors who support the doctrine that his particular pastor holds, about what they think of a “covenantal head” and they all said that there is no such position given to anyone in the body of Christ. Jesus is our only “covenantal head” of the body of Christ. When men think they have this position, no wonder they get the idea that they are allowed to rule over others. But this is the fallen human nature that wants the right to rule people. I have never seen such an attitude of entitlement turn out for good.

27 gengwall,

I understand what Cheryl and Paula are saying but it is naive to believe that such a utopian commune can exist in a fallen world.

I think that Paula answered this quite well in post #28. We are in a fallen world and we do not have the ability to live as God wants us to live without the work of the Holy Spirit. What is impossible with man is possible with God.

31 Lin,

The problem is that we really do believe that a human has to be in charge. We bring our worldly thinking into the Body. We have been trained that way (even in church) to follow men instead of Christ.

I too think that we have let the world influence us. Yet in the body of Christ we are all to attain to maturity. It is so easy sometimes to just follow a man and let a man or men tell us what to do. When I worked for many years helping people come free of the cults, I found that they were trained to believe they needed leaders to tell them what to do, say, think and act. One former cult member really helped me to understand this. She was raised in a cult and so she “put on” the cult mentality since she was a child. Everyone looked and thought the same because it was considered a sin to think independently. They were all taught that no one can understand the bible without being taught what it means. Then when she got out of the cult she said that it was a fearful thing because now she had to think for herself. She said that she didn’t even know who “she” was. Since she was raised in the cult, the cult was who she was until she left. Learning to think for herself was a very difficult challenge for her.