Edification/Participation: Either/Or, Both/And?
I recently became acquainted with Jeff from “Until All Have Heard” when he sent me an email about his latest post called “Edification and Participation: Don’t Have One Without the Other“. I appreciate how Jeff discusses both edification and participation, particularly looking at the results of having edification without participation or participation without edification.
I agree with Jeff that most church meetings today – at least the ones that I’m familiar with – attempt edification without mutual participation. Of course, the concern of many believers is that if they allow anyone to speak, they will end up with participation without edification. Jeff calls for church meetings which include both “maximum edification” and “maximum participation”. I agree that this seems to be the model that we see in Scripture.
Read through Jeff’s article and see what you think. Do you agree that we need both edification and participation? Can we have one without the other? If so, what happens?
If you’re interested, about a year ago I wrote a series on mutual edification and its implications. The first post is called “Mutual Edification and Individualism“. Also, several months ago, I wrote another series on edification that begins with the post “Edification 1 – Introduction“. You can link to the other posts in those series from those posts.