Surely this has to be one of the most frightening verses in the New Testament! When the Apostle Paul issues his considered verdict over the church at Corinth, inspired by the Holy Spirit, he declares that its gatherings are doing more harm than good. That must have been incredibly difficult for the Corinthians to hear!

I imagine that they must have protested that there were many good things taking place in their church gatherings. They read the Scriptures together. They took communion together. They prophesied to one another. They spoke in tongues and healed the sick together. They did many things that, frankly, we would like to do more of in our own churches today. But that isn’t Paul’s point. He readily confesses that the Corinthians are doing many things that are good and pleasing to the Lord. It’s just that they are unaware of the harm that they are also doing and of how much it outweighs all of the other good things they are doing.

This makes it a little easier when we encounter disciple-makers from the Middle East and Asia and Africa. They are not denying that there are many good things in our churches. They freely admit that they have much to learn from Western believers when it comes to systematic theology, long-term planning and ways of safeguarding adult interactions with children. Disciple-making movements are not immune to the sins that infect Western churches. They are the first to admit that they have much to learn – and yet they still dare to ask this awkward question of the churches across North America and Europe: In spite of all the good things you are doing, is it possible that your meetings are unwittingly doing more harm than good through some of your inherited church traditions?

Actions speak louder than words. If ninety-nine percent of believers are sitting quietly in rows and listening to a person on a platform telling them that the elders have agreed that they must believe in the priesthood of believers, then that truth is undermined by the very way in which we teach it! If we hold Mission Sundays and pray for the Great Commission to be completed, while forbidding believers from baptizing people outside of Sunday services, then we are praying in vain – our actions demonstrate that something matters to us more.

Paul’s main point is that the Corinthian believers are blissfully unaware of how much harm is being done amid the good things that are happening at their church gatherings. The question is not whether or not good things are happening in our own churches. Of course they are! The question is merely one of how much harm is also inadvertently being done.

Even while a pastor is preaching a great sermon, he may inadvertently be wowing people into thinking that they could never understand the Scriptures as well as he does, and so they learn to accept a second-hand relationship with God. At the very moment that a worship leader is helping three hundred believers to sing about how happy Jesus makes us as the Son of God, he may be excluding a woman who miscarried that very morning and who is left with a sense that God doesn’t want to hear her prayers of lament; he prefers to receive worship songs that carry a happy tune. That worship leader may also be offending the Muslim visitor so deeply by the song lyrics that are projected onto the wall that the Muslim fails to stick around long enough to listen to the morning’s Bible reading. Things do not have to be morally wrong for our Sunday services to do more harm than good; they just have to be ineffective because they are not what the Lord has told us to do when we gather together.

It takes humility to recognize this and to ask the Lord what harmful things we may be doing that outweigh the many good things we are doing. When the Lord answers us, we need to do what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 12:9 – “Shrink away from what is evil; hold fast to what is good.”.