A church's temperature

Every church has a temperature. It is the subtlest of things. A church's temperature is not identical to its doctrine, its creeds, or even the sermons or the hymns --- which may be biblical enough. Neither is it articulated outright, but is nevertheless somehow well understood. It is, I would say, a silently collective agreement about the degree to which God is who he says he is; an unspoken consensus of what it is we really believe around here. And it is, for all its tacitness, remarkably specific.

I liken it to the way a child learns language. The outsider to that language group will observe it best perhaps --- the way the mastery of a person's mother tongue is not some general mastery but a mimicry perfected to the most infinitesimally precise imitation of inflection.

So with a church's or denomination's culture. We in any given culture have discerned from a thousand subtle cues how much to believe in Jesus and how much not to. That is, how far to go, and how much farther would be fanatical. We imagine all the while that we are holding to the whole counsel of God. But in fact, we have our chosen texts, verses, and emphases that we carefully stay within and keep recycling.

For instance, our church's woman's Bible study once did the book of James. When we came to chapter 5, we taught on verses 1 through 13 but skipped over 14 and 15 before completing the rest. No one noticed. It was not a conspiratorial thing, nor a cynical omission. Just a temperature, I would say.