Bound in Love

That’s not to say that we won’t have quirky charismatic leaders in an apostolic age. The church needs to be ready for some energetic messiness if she wants to remain alive and capture the wider culture. Because the age of Christendom is no more, church administrators should probably not waste too much time trying to enforce orderliness. The apostolic age will be a messy age. Consider St. Paul. Anyone who reads his letters can see he was a difficult fellow, and he was the one willing to rebuke St. Peter at the Council of Jerusalem. Consider the sons of thunder, the apostle brothers James and John. Jesus needed to rebuke them from time to time even though they were clearly in the top three of the 12 apostles. They were the ones who went with St. Peter to Mount Tabor and witnessed the Transfiguration. But they were also the ones who argued about where they got to sit when they got to heaven. So we should not be surprised if we have interesting eccentric characters in our apostolic church.