BLOG. 6/5/13. THE CHURCH IN ITS ESSENCE: COUNTER-CULTURAL
This week, the obituary of Will Campbell has been in major papers. For my generation he was a colorful, controversial, and maverick—but insightful—prophet. He was of the opinion that most churches in the South, where he lived, were the last places on earth one would go to really hear the teachings of Jesus. It’s easy for us, at this distance to eulogize Will Campbell, but not always so.
Out of my mainline, and Southern, church experience in those days of the 1950s and 60s, to express any affinity or approval or appreciation of Will Campbell (or of Clarence Jordan) was to invite immediate suspicion of one’s evangelical orthodoxy, or ONE’S credibility even. Will’s prophetic words were to the white church in the South—the black church was a different scene.
Somehow, perhaps especially since the time of Constantine, the church has had a continual proclivity to conform itself to—or better to become captive to—it’s dominant social order, and in so doing to forsake its calling to be the communal demonstration of God’s New Creation (Kingdom) in Christ, i.e., counter-cultural.
This is obviously still true. We have created a church that is comfortable with its cultural context, and is perhaps populated with (what someone described) “baptized pagans.” We have created such a church at the price of forsaking any call to repentance, or to invite folk to participate on the basis of faith, but without repentance, and so to (as Bonhoeffer observed) to preach cheap grace.
Face it: Christ’s calling is quite radical. It is a calling out of the dominion of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. It demands radical change. Christ never downplayed this: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Or, as Bonhoeffer explained: “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die!”
The Sermon on the Mount describes the radical lifestyle of God’s Kingdom people, and includes his blessing on those who are reviled and persecuted, and this because New Creation folk are not conformed to the patterns of this present age—we are witnesses of a new and reconciled and recreated, and present reality that exposes the distortions of what is dominant in culture. We may well be considered weird. In Will Campbell’s eyes, the destructiveness of racism was glaringly obvious in the church.
The church is radically counter-cultural. It only ceases to be that when it truncates (or bastardizes) itself into a comfortable, religious, aesthetically pleasing, and sociable community with activities to justify its existence and your participation. So, to espouse any of Christ’s teachings that would upset, or estrange folk, is hardly imaginable. The true gospel, or the demands of Christ for Kingdom obedience are eclipsed. The church, then, becomes the religious expression of the culture of darkness (racism, environment degradation, consumerism and greed, etc.) no matter how we attempt to equivocate that distortion of Christ’s purpose for his church.
This is true of every generation and age. But God continues to raise up those faithful communities and voices, and build his church that is faithful to his teachings … while many venerable, so-called, ‘church institutions’ rock along oblivious to how irrelevant they are to the mission of God, or the teachings of Jesus. Occasionally, God sends along a Will Campbell to stick a pin in their unreality.
[Personal note: I’ll be out of pocket for about a week. Getting a new knee. Back soon.]
