John Trabucchi

We have to leave room in the life of the church for Acts 15:39 situations. If the apostles could have sharp disagreements with one another over matters of judgment, and go there separate ways without anathematizing one another, we can too. Sometimes thing just don't work out. Some situations in a fallen world cannot be resolved this side of judgment day. Sometimes good people just come to different situations about complex situations. We can go separate ways while still recognizing one another as brothers. Not every disagreement has to end in an excommunication or condemnation. We must keep a sense of proportion.

The Plymouth Pilgrims accidentally ran the first documented socialist experiment in America three centuries before Marx scribbled his manifesto. Governor William Bradford's "common storehouse" system from 1620-1623 delivered textbook collectivist results: mass shirking, crop failures, and near-starvation. Bradford recorded the disaster in detail. Young men "complained that they were oppressed" when forced to work for others without reward. Productive colonists watched lazy neighbors receive equal rations despite contributing nothing. The system "was found to breed much confusion and discontent" because it violated basic human incentives. People starved while fertile Massachusetts soil lay underworked. The turnaround came swiftly in 1623 when Bradford abandoned the collective model and assigned private family plots. Production exploded overnight. Women and children voluntarily joined field work when their families directly benefited from extra effort. The same colonists who nearly died under socialism suddenly produced abundant harvests under private property. Bradford explicitly credited private ownership for saving Plymouth Colony. He documented how individual responsibility transformed human behavior within a single growing season. Individual effort cannot be separated from individual reward without destroying both. Every socialist experiment since Plymouth has repeated this identical pattern. Different century, different continent, same predictable collapse when planners ignore the reality of human nature. No matter what they call it, whenever and wherever collectivist ideas are put into practice, disaster soon follows.

One of Screwtape's strategies for his nephew Wormwood was not to keep his patient from church altogether, but to ensure he only attended once he found the perfect one. The man should go to church, but always on his own terms, constantly scanning for faults and measuring the congregation against some ideal in his head. If Wormwood can convince him to hold out for the perfect church, he will never find it. This does several things: - It keeps him from committing anywhere. - It feeds pride, placing him in judgment over the church rather than under it. - It cuts him off from real Christian fellowship, which requires patience and humility. - It trains his attention on trivial concerns rather than the substance of worship. The goal is to keep him sitting back, critiquing and comparing, and ultimately detached from any actual body where he is known and corrected. This pattern seems apparent today in how people consume online discourse. Podcasts and social media raise expectations that no local pastor or congregation can realistically meet. The subject becomes doctrinally opinionated and ecclesiastically rootless, which ends up being a disaster for the patient. I was recently part of a conversation with a man who avoids church entirely because no congregation is sufficiently "based" in his area. "Most are compromised," he said, and he was actively encouraging others toward the same conclusion. Honestly, Screwtape could not have scripted it better.

"Such is the madman of experience...He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point... They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black... [T]hey cannot alter their standpoint; they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white."