What Churches Can Learn from Bedikat Chametz:
Have you ever heard of a church that performs annual spiritual house cleaning? I mean a church that deals with its sin, corporately, on a regular basis. Me neither.
But a reader of these blog posts told me that he once heard of a church that did. He likened it to the Jewish practice of Bedikat Chametz. “Bedikat Chametz” is the Jewish practice of removing leaven from one’s home ahead of Passover (Ex. 12:15). Churches can learn from it.
The evening before Passover, Jews search their homes for any food product made from leavened flour (Chametz). The next morning, participants burn it in a fire. Cakes, cookies, pasta, and their crumbs enter the flames. Spiritually, the leaven signifies hidden sin in the life, household, and community of faith.
Bedikat Chametz is an annual activity among Jews to this day. What if churches searched under the rugs and in forgotten closets for sinful leaven they ignored in their life, household, and congregation through the year? What if we annually brought that leaven into the light and disposed of it?
Similar Annual Practices
Why not? We do similar things in other areas of life. For example, most of us perform annual “Spring cleaning.” We wash windows and purge clutter from our homes. We evict cobwebs and dust bunnies from the premises. As a result, we enjoy a fresh atmosphere in our homes. Like an April breeze, all seems right with the world again.
Consider another example, a church “workday” where the congregation is invited to show up with brooms and mops, and clean and repair the church building. The shrubs receive trimming, maintenance issues get tackled, power washing and painting ensues. It’s a communal effort to make one’s facility look kept and attractive. Workdays are an annual practice in many churches.
Cleaning Out the Old Leaven
But what about “spiritual house cleaning?” Shall our churches go from year to year and decade to decade without spiritual cleansing? Shall we clean the inside of our homes and not the house of God? Shall we make the outside of our church “look good” without addressing the leaven within? Jesus warned the Pharisees of this very thing in Matt. 23:25:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence.
Paul also understood the danger of living with such spiritual “leaven.” He rebuked the Corinthian’s pride and malice as a symbol of such “leaven” which was defiling them:
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let’s celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor. 5:6-8).
Leaven Curtails Fruitfulness
Paul made clear that churches can become infected with such “leaven.” This includes wounds and sins that impact the whole congregation. Untreated, they spread like leaven in bread. In our ministry, we see the impact of arrogance, conflicts, church splits, rebellions, and theological aberrations which go unaddressed. Such forms of leaven curtail a ministry’s fruitfulness.
Paul instructed the Corinthians to “clean out the old leaven”, to do Bedikat Chametz. When do our modern churches do this? The fact is that most do not. As a result, the leaven begins to “stink up the place” no matter how many church workdays you have.
We might not smell the leaven in our congregations, but visitors often do, and God always does. I can only imagine how the Church at large would be renewed if every church consciously purged the spiritual leaven from its midst annually. Should we be surprised by the condition of our culture if churches don’t deal with its hidden and sometimes open sins before the Lord?
Revelation 19:17 anticipates the marriage of the Lamb. It says, “His bride has made herself ready.” Do you think Jesus’ return is closer now than ever? Has your church made “herself ready?” Let’s stop living with leaven. Let’s perform annual Bedikat Chametzs in our churches. Then, perhaps the Lord will send a fresh breeze of His Spirit and use His people in a new and powerful way.
Mark Barnard serves with Blessing Point Ministries. Since 2006 Blessing Point Ministries has worked to heal ministries with painful histories. To learn about discerning hidden leaven in your ministry we recommend The Eighth Letter: Exploring Jesus’ Letters to the Seven Churches and Discovering What He is Saying to Yours by Dr. Kenneth Quick and Mark Barnard.