The Smell Test

Today's Daily Mail has an article that references the science behind detecting disease via the sense of smell. Apparently there are devices currently under development, and the article also references specially trained dogs that can identify certain diseases.

It puts me in mind of when our son Donny was receiving chemo in an effort to combat the vasculitis that was ruining his retinas, leaving him blind for a few months in 2012. During chemo, a good friend's dog wouldn’t have anything to do with Donny. The otherwise happy dog, which always looked to Donny for affection, was obviously disturbed by Donny’s presence… growling and hiding until months after the chemo wore off. Our conclusion: the dog could smell that there was something wrong. He didn’t know precisely what was wrong… but he knew that he didn’t like it, so he made himself scarce whenever Donny came around. Donny wasn’t passing the smell test.

Similarly, sometimes churches don’t pass the smell test. People come but they don’t stay… they may not have a clue why, but they can tell something isn’t quite right. Something seems sick or at least unhealthy.

1 Corinthian 12 describes the church in terms of a body (a human body). The church (the Body of Christ) is built like the human body in that it is one body made of many parts… unity through diversity. The text in 1 Corinthians paints word pictures that describe a body with missing parts, or a body that is made up of just one part. With just a little imagination we might picture such a body… which really isn’t a body at all, but more like a monstrosity.

This is the sort of thing that happens when we mistake uniformity for unity (see my post on unity verses uniformity). Rather than pursuing unity through diversity, we pursue the cheap substitute of uniformity. And then we are somehow surprised when outsiders look at our churches, and rather than seeing a beautiful depiction of the Body of Christ, all they see is a monstrosity. Even when they can’t quite identify what is repelling them, outsiders can sense that something is unhealthy and wrong when our churches settle for uniformity rather than pursue God’s designed unity through diversity.

I spoke about this in part of my sermon at Pleasant Bay yesterday; you can access the audio and my notes at http://pleasantbay.cedarpark.org/services