Co-Op farming
1 Corinthians 3:9
For we are God’s coworkers, working together
Paul’s chief advice to the Church in Corinth is this: trying to make church life make sense by applying worldly patterns to it won’t work.
After Paul convened the church, and Apollos followed up with them, the congregants were left to their own ways and tried to apply the structure of philosophical schools to their communal life. That meant each had to pick a teacher: that one over this one based on who is more famous, or more correct, or more spiritually enlightened. Was this going to be Paul’s school? Or Apollos’? The reputation of the disciples depended entirely on who won the position of head teacher.
Paul tells them they’re thinking about it all wrong. They’re not disciples in a a school, they’re more like crops on a co-op farm, with God working alongside them all equally. And the farm isn’t growing fame, it’s growing revolution.
What secular structure you participate in - a school, a job, a jail, a family - is held in place by a worldly pattern that is no longer serving it? How would it operate if every person involved shared equal power to shape it with God?
— Kate Davoli
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