BLOG 8/24/16. THE CHURCH: RETRIEVING ITS ‘RAISON D’ETRE’

BLOG 8/24/16. THE CHURCH: RETRIEVING ITS RAISON D’ETRE

I am continually intrigued by that Silicon Valley bunch, and all of the stuff they have created that couldn’t have even been conceived a couple of decades ago, … and how they keep coming up with almost unimaginable innovations that will become the norm for tomorrow’s world. Let’s take Apple as a case in point: Steve Jobst and now Tim Cook are unique dudes. If they had, or do become content with ‘what is’ and so crank out more of the same, … or if they become content with their current profitability and ‘rest on their oars’ … they will wake up one morning and find they have been left behind. But the reality is that they have something like 20,000 employees (according to my sources) who are all fully alert to the company’s purpose and are recruited to throw themselves into anticipating and reconceiving tomorrow’s world and its needs. In small working units of 10-12 they each invest their intense focus and creativity on that as-yet-unknown world, and are fully and intensely invested in the company’s raison d’etre. And they are in communication. They purportedly have some kind of a Friday gathering of all the units in which there is communication between the working units, and up and down the corporate structure from executives to working groups. But note: nobody is passive or uninformed or totally un-invested in the reason Apple exists. (Granted Apple can choose the brightest and recruit the budding geniuses, and the church doesn’t have that luxury.) And every employee is accountable and regularly evaluated as to their value to the company.

But then I look at at the church, and the plethora of books that have come off the press in recent decades trying to conceive the church for this emerging post-Christian culture, and the baggage that it continues to carry somehow lacks a basic and dynamic sense of the church’s dynamic raison d’etre in God’s design for the salvation of the world. Frankly, it comes off as pretty ‘fuzzy’ with pockets of articulate vitality here and there, but over all it is all too passively dependent on its its executive-clergy domination, but with little grass-roots creative engagement in the church’s purpose in the design of God.  It tends to have a weekly meeting, but who, then, equips its participants for the other six days? And with which others do I engage in enabling it to challenge tomorrow’s world?

Like: when persons encounter the church in its multiple forms, exactly what do they perceive to be its consuming reason for being? When the church invites / recruits folk to ‘join’ what does the person being recruited / invited comprehend about the demands of being a participant of that particular church? What are its core values? To whom is one accountable for his/her faithfulness to the community’s fruitfulness in the Mission of God? What does baptism commit them to?

Or when is a ‘church’ even a ‘church’? What makes a church contagious and irrepressible in its calling to be God’s salt and light in the midst of a culture with so many episodes and persons captive to an alien agenda?

That much for my teaser questions for today. But let me leave you with this: Early on God made known through the early prophets that he was going to make all things new. There would be a New Creation / Kingdom of God invading this old and fallen creation, and it would be expedited by God’s anointed messenger. So Jesus came on the scene announcing that God’s New Creation was at hand, and that it would be present and growing, … until it would ultimately come to total fulfillment. Meanwhile Jesus called out a new community, the church, and gave it the raison d’etre of making that reality known to every people group / ethne in the world with that ultimate ‘tomorrow’ in view. All of its presence was to make this a reality, and it would be empowered by God’s Spirit. Question: Does every person who is baptized realize that they are personally to be engaged and responsible for this divine mandate, and for tomorrow’s world? Do they know that by virtue of their baptismal vows they become responsible for this ministry? Hardly. So this is a basic challenge in reconceiving the church for tomorrow’s world.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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