The church of Christ is built upon the foundation of truth. Christ has chosen pastors to teach his truth as written in the Bible. However, like negligent teachers who can cause damage to students' life, pastors who do not study the Bible carefully harm people's destiny forever. If the church lacks pastors teaching the truth, it will either fall prey to heresy or fade away.
However, some missionaries and church leaders have not realized their responsibility. Taking the church as personal property, they are busy collecting their own wealth among believers, maintaining their own authority and building up their kingdoms in the church. Each leader arrogantly believes that he is the most spiritual one, making it difficult for him to communicate with others. This is what happened to divided churches in both family and public church.
The division was caused mostly by different opinions or conflicting interests when the church enjoyed some degree of freedom in faith after the 80s.
When division attacks the church, it adds more gathering spots so the church lacking in teachers faces a greater shortage of preachers as they are divided in these gathering spots. Though some gathering spots are so-called churches, they only have several members and lack qualified teachers of the Bible. The author discovered years ago that their ignorant teachers gave a ridiculous explanation of the Bible because they did not know the Bible well or understand the essential teachings about salvation. They could only teach some basic rules of life.
Seeing this tragic reality, true believers question when believers can open their eyes to the truth?
According to Paul, the Gospel is unclear only to those who have been blinded by the devil in 2 Corinthians 4:3-4. Though God's children should not be ignorant, many of them cannot grow spiritually in their knowledge of truth because of some arrogant church leaders causing division and confusion.
The church has many flaws but the more serious ones are caused by internal factors so the self-applauding church leaders had better check themselves to see whether they have become the shepherds to be condemned by God described in Ezekiel 34:1-10.
Translated by Alvin Zhou
