BLOG 11/29/15. WHEN IS A CHURCH REALLY A CHURCH?

BLOG 11/29/15. WHEN IS A CHURCH REALLY A CHURCH?

I apologize if I revisit this unanswerable question far too often with you faithful readers of these blogs, but it keeps cropping up in my conversations, especially as I find so many people offended by, or bored with, or dismissive of some particular expression of an ostensible church they have encountered. Are there guidelines that might be used to measure a community’s authenticity as a true colony of God’s New Creation … as over against something like a merely respectable religious institution?

One cultural anthropologist had been asked to do a study the reasons behind the decline of a formerly vital Christian missionary organization.[1] His conclusion was that every such Christian community, if it was well founded, started with a vital and determining founding myth, or a compelling sense of God’s intent for its founding. His conclusion was that when that selfsame community diluted, displaced, or forgot its ‘founding myth,’ that it “reverted to chaos.” The same is true across the board. Christian communities most often (I would assume) are founded by a group of believers, who sense that it is important for them to establish a vital Christian presence in some form and with some message in some place. How, then, does that good beginning devolve into just a sterile religious institution?

There are all kinds of pieces to answering that question.  For one thing, it is my conviction that Christian communities have a life span, that Christian communities are initiated by one generation, but that the compelling vision frequently fades in the second generation, and becomes but a memory by the third generation. Christian communities that have successfully kept the founding myth alive and formative over succeeding generations can continue to be fruitful in the mission of God. But the proliferation of dying or sterile old and venerable church institutions that dot our landscape would indicate that they are trying to live on former momentum but have long since diluted, displaced, or forgotten their dynamic sense of God’s purpose for them in his mission—they have forgotten their founding myth.

This reality comes with all kinds of ancillary issues and questions. How does such a community continually refine, keep focal and dynamic, and equip the emerging generation to be the dynamic incarnation of God’s New Creation community? How to equip and re-evangelize every individual for their work of ministry in the daily marketplace? How to distinguish between true goals, and those which are simply goals of institutional survival.

Run these questions by the rank and file of most congregations and you are not likely to always get convincing answers. What does you church want to produce? Individually? Communally? What celebrations and disciplines keep the individuals’ faith rich and mature and contagious? How does the leadership of the community answer these questions?

A few years ago a poll of a large denomination did a study along these lines, and though the denomination’s tradition was rich theologically, the poll concluded that it was a denomination of Biblically and theologically illiterate laity. Ouch! That, even though its leadership were ostensibly trained in substantial and accredited theological institutions. One could only conclude that the theological schools had also forgotten their founding myth, and were producing church professionals who were part of the chaos that Gerald Arbuckle addressed.[2]

[1] Gerald Arbuckle. Out of Chaos, Orbis Press

[2] Ibid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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