Quenching the Spirit
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Perhaps the greatest abuse and misuse of talent on earth today is found in the church. The practice of hiring one man to edify the saints exclusively, while others who are sometimes even better equipped, must sit in perpetual silence and are never given opportunity to address the congregation, is a little ridiculous. In some places brilliant attorneys who can plead a case where life and death is involved are not deemed qualified to plead the cause of the King of kings. Erudite professors and schoolmen must be fed on partisan pap week after week although in demand to speak before societies composed of their educational peers. If this type of brain drain was practiced in the business world, bankruptcy would be inevitable.
It was to all of the saints these words were addressed, "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of God's word" (Hebrews 5:12). You ought to be teachers. This is God's ideal. God never bestowed a useless gift. Every gift is intended to be exercised and developed. It is the duty of the congregation to provide and maintain an opportunity for the growth and development of every member to his highest potential. I unhesitatingly charge that our current method not only fails to do this but actually operates to prevent it!
The devil has tricked us into presenting a well-managed performance under the guise that this is worship. We no longer gather as at a family reunion about the table. We come as the spectators of a drama and if it is not well staged we will attend another theater. And we'll take the price of admission with us. There is where the rub comes in!
Most of us are condemned always to be hearers, not doers, in the assembly. We are ever learning and never coming to the use of our knowledge. We are the taught ones, the interminably taught ones whose ears must enlarge while our brains wither and our tongues paralyze from disuse, for it is by teaching that one really grows in all of his mental faculties.
Plato said, "To teach is the way for a man to learn most and best."
Clement of Alexandria said, "In teaching the instructor often learns more than his pupils."
Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, wrote, "The one exclusive sign that a man is thoroughly cognizant of anything, is that he is able to teach it."
And the blind Homer, who may have been contemporary with Elijah, wrote thus:
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"Through mutual intercourse and mutual aid,
Great deeds are done and great decisions made;
The wise new wisdom on the wise bestow,
While the lone thinker's thoughts come slight and slow."In 1663, Dr. Robert Anderson of London said in his book Reason and Judgment, "I learn much from my master, more from my equals, and most of all from my disciples."
If every congregation regularly placed on its public speaking program, every qualified man, or every man who could become qualified, the Cause would soon have a multitude of capable defenders in every business and profession. There is little incentive to qualify if you know you'll never to be called upon to use your ability. And the congregation suffers from a lack of fresh and original approach which it could experience. It is useless to pretend that we are interested in restoration of primitive Christianity unless we include a realistic return to the priesthood of all believers and the ministry of all of the saints.
Dr. Robert Young was an eminent scholar who gave us a great Analytical Concordance, as well as a new translation of the entire Bible, along with numerous other works in Biblical and Oriental Literature. In his comment on 1 Corinthians 14:26, he wrote:
"From this and other passages it is clear that the upbuilding of the church was not confined, then, as now, to one, or at the most two, of the congregation; but was the privilege of all the members, and though such a practice is liable to abuse (James 3:1), it is possible that its entire disuse has led to still greater evils obvious to all--'quenching the Spirit.'"