Have you ever taken a step back and thought about sports? Let me use football for an example again (I promise, this is not just retaliation for that injury I got playing football at age 13). In this game, players must get a ball to the end of the field to score points which add up to declare who wins. These rules are manmade.
There is nothing in the nature of the universe decreeing how football should be played. Humans came up with the idea of sewing leather together into a two-pointed ball, making a field 100 yards long, setting boundary lines, describing a legal tackle, and differentiating between a fumble and a touchdown. Using these rules, the league then measures the success of each player in relation to how well they conform.
Men who play well within those rules achieve overwhelming fame. Knowing which of those arbitrary boundary lines not to cross and which ones to run toward, a few contestants hop, skip, and jump their way into millions of dollars. What has moving the ball from one place done for the environment? Nothing. How has it helped save the whales? In no way. How has humanity become more loving, intelligent, or emotionally healthy because of that weird ball zigzagging across a field while tucked in a man’s sweaty armpit? It hasn’t.
Yet people cheer, buy jackets with their team’s logo, and call these performers celebrities. It is an artificially designed system. Why does no one question it? Why is it accepted as if this is the way things are supposed to be? Why shouldn’t football players have to step on four bases before making a touchdown? Why shouldn’t they throw the football through a hoop to score? Other sports do that.

Are preachers like football heroes?

As a preacher, I can say this without malice or a mind for anarchy. The whole game of preaching could become as arbitrary as football or any other sport. In your mind, you have established boundaries for how a preacher should behave.
You know when preachers cross the line. They should not discuss certain topics, right? They should not make jokes about women, overweight people, or minorities. They should not scream and slobber but they also should not be monotone and boring.
You also know what preachers should do. They should make you laugh. They should make you happy cry. When you need it, they should make you ugly cry. They should inspire you to try harder this week, to see hope in misery, and to find your true self in Jesus.
If a preacher stays inside all our expectations and does not get tackled or fouled, they also can fill up stadiums. Those who drop the ball get booed and quickly forgotten. The one who gets a touchdown on every play becomes a hero and widely known.
Yet, like with professional sports, have we stopped to ask ourselves how we got these rules? Who outlined the parameters for a perfect preacher? Are preachers a human invention like football players? If not, who invented them and what does the original playbook say they should be like? Does the Inventor of preachers have any historical legends we can look at as examples?

Another social experiment

The educational system is another interesting study in subjective systems. Everyone in civilization is measured by education. Schooling is a closed system of conveying known information from older humans to younger humans.
Who determined what children need to know to be ready for life? How much math must you learn before you will survive on your own: algebra, trig, calculus? How deep do your language skills have to be for you to be a competent adult? Must you understand gerunds, iambic pentameter, and subjunctive mood? How much science do you need to know? How to split an atom, build a rocket, or survive a lava flow? How much history do you need to know? All the US Presidents names, their contenders who lost, the middle names of all the Presidents’ wives?
I believe in education, but I find it amusing how someone can assume they have drawn the line at the perfect spot for what 1st graders should know, what 5th graders should know, and what a college grad should know from the vast body of information available to us today. Should we have to know any of those facts as long as we all know how to use Google? Is math necessary knowledge now that every phone comes with a calculator app?
Go ahead and ignore my sarcasm and let’s look at the well-known failures of the public education experiment. Intellectualism was the messiah of the enlightenment—if we just know enough we will cure all bad stuff. You hear people talk like this today, “If we built better schools we wouldn’t have to build so many prisons.” Actually, the schools themselves admit the kids have poor ethics (morals) so they have begun adding in extracurricular stuff on character building. Turns out that all those math facts didn’t make moral citizens.
It is not just religious diehards who complain about the product coming out of the government education factories. Studies in business show that people with high IQ are not always likely to succeed in their field of labor. Studies have isolated another element that is more important than fact smarts: emotional intelligence.
It turns out that peer pressure and other social factors in the school system are a detriment to emotional intelligence. In other words, the system that was designed to measure and predict successful people turned out to be an arbitrary system. This manmade product is now having to be remade by humans to try to fix the problems we now face in society.
Can the school system develop healthy self-awareness in students? Can it motivate little humans to be respectful, loyal, industrious, and generous? Time will tell. But I did not mention the school system to condemn or fix it. I simply bring it up to show how we humans can develop elaborate systems, like pro football, to measure ourselves by and declare winners, when both the system and our proclaimed results might not be what humans really need.
I mentioned preachers earlier. What about that system preachers move within? Is the church a manmade system or is it more?

Is the church a closed system?

Our local church gets calls every so often from people wanting help paying their rent, electric bills, or to get gas money to bring their kid to a soccer game. I have often wondered how our community came to the belief that churches had limitless budgets to pay people’s bills. I grew up seeing the church as an opportunity to give and never once asked for help with my bills when I was struggling.
My point is that we all have preconceptions about what a church is and does. My idea could be wrong. Are the boundaries and goals of the churches made by man or God? Easy answer, right? God invented the church. But one of the things that keeps me awake at night sometimes is thinking of how God also invented the faith and practices of ancient Israel, but the scribes and Pharisees retooled that system into a different game entirely.
A church doesn’t seem right without a pulpit, does it? Many churches have not only a platform (stage), but also a “platform policy” detailing who is allowed in that space. Who ordained these building designs? Did God designate a building structure? Is He concerned with buildings at all? Yet these things leap into most minds first at the very mention of the word “church.” I don’t want to play just another manmade game.
The religious leaders Jesus confronted were the heroes of the day—they were the major leagues everyone compared their home game to. And they were wrong, deadly wrong. They had created a system they could win at, but like institutionalized education, their manmade system overlooked an important element. Do you know what it was? Are we making the same mistake?

A different goal line than you thought

The business world measures success by assets and bank accounts. So do many churches. Jesus doesn’t. He says, “Blessed are you poor, For yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). Do we celebrate the surrender of ourselves? Do we consider “zero” a goal? Satan lures with wealth; Jesus leads us to give up all the things of earth. So I ask again, is your game manmade, or are you playing by the official guide?
Businesses, sports, and even grade schools require people to measure up to some benchmark to be approved. By so doing, they usually limit folks to stay at whatever level it is they celebrate. Church groups are often guilty of building a closed system like this based on does and don’ts. In the Kingdom from above, the sky is no limit. We can grow inwardly and upwardly without limit in Jesus. What were His rules again? Hmm, love with all the heart, mind, soul, strength—there is no inzone in sight on that one.
Most manmade systems are about finding fulfillment and happiness. This comes with awards, money, possessions, rank, and power. Jesus wants us to be happy, too. He has a different path for us to get there: “Happy are those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4). Human systems are all about finding pleasure in food, entertainment, and private ownership of property. The true church of Jesus celebrates fasting, sacrifice, and giving.
Who wrote the rules to the game you are playing? Most churches follow the measures of big business. Jesus valued a small group of highly committed persons over a big crowd wearing the team T-shirt. Too many megachurches are buildings full of empty people. One of the haunting issues in our age of interconnectivity is loneliness and isolation—something the God-designed church solves.
The systems of this world struggle to bring together people of different backgrounds and value systems. Jesus brought people from dissimilar backgrounds into close community and used their natural friction to grow them into His likeness. Many churches create a safety zone where people don’t have to be real with each other, just show up to show off their best hairdo and clothes each week. No vulnerability or accountability.

What are some other areas where our values might have gotten off track? Share some good things your local church does to play by the official rules of the Kingdom and not conform to this world.