BLOG 5/9/13: WHAT IS THE LIFE-SPAN OF A CONGREGATION?
The life span of a congregation: what? I was discussing this with a wonderful friend who is a church planter over lunch in our favorite pub one day. So a vital Christian community is established, and is very self-conscious of who they are and why they exist in that particular context. The participants have self-consciously engaged themselves in the mission of that new community. They are obviously attached to the teaching shepherd who has given birth to their community, and who forms and feeds them on serious engagement with scripture week by week.
The question: how long with this last? What happens when this popular pastor and teacher leaves or retires? What happens in a second generation? The question is a serious one because we have a quite mistaken concept of a Christendom church that is essentially a sacralized building, clergy, liturgies, and very much a humanly explainable institution of religious Christianity. (Such a concept seems oblivious to the calling of every participant to be engaged in the mission and to be equipped for maturity in Christ.)
But look at the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. They were one generation away from their apostolic founding, and yet (with the exception of the two under persecution) they were beginning to lose their focus and their sense of purpose and mission. From the evidence we have, the churches of that early period were pretty mobile, flexible, and versatile … but there were at work those corrosive influences of the dominion of darkness in which they lived.
I watched an interview with the retiring president of Yale University recently. He has been a very successful president of a prestige university for twenty years. But in the interview he explained that every seven years he totally re-evaluates what he has accomplished in the past seven years, and reconceives what he want to accomplish in the coming seven years. This means that he is always reconceiving what he is doing in the light of what would make Yale and even more significant force in the educational world. There’s something Biblical about that. There is the Sabbath year for Israel in which they let the land lie fallow for a year. There is the annual Passover observance when they in essence go back to the boundary and remember from whence they have come and why Yahweh has called them. Then there is the Jubilee Year when all the land returns to those original recipients of the land grants, and in which all the indentured servants are set free. They go back to Square #1 every fifty years.
If a particular church, or Christian community, is “successful” and has all of the accouterments of institutional Christianity with the degree of prestige that goes along with that – does that mean it is a true expression of that for which Christ calls his church? If it is populated with religious folk who participate passively in church programs, but do not see themselves as 24/7, well-equipped agents of the mission of God, can it be called a church of Kingdom integrity.
Is there with our particular church communities a discipline, such as practiced by the president of Yale, whereby we deliberately and periodically evaluate who we are, why Christ has called us, and how effectively we are incarnating the mission of God? And can we include those church professionals in such and evaluation? Do we have a capacity to look at the culture and the demographics of our context to see if we are effective as a contagious community of God’s New Creation (Kingdom of God)?
In the days of Israel’s decline and apostasy they had all of the accouterments: temple, priesthood, celebrations … but they had forgotten why they were there, and their meaning in the design of God. So the question: What is the life span of a Christian community?
