BLOG 1/6/16. WHAT ON EARTH IS THE CHURCH?

BLOG 1/6/16. WHAT ON EARTH IS THE CHURCH?

I have sympathy for those curious observers out there who look at all the confusing entities on the scene that designate themselves as ‘the church’. I often get asked the question myself in casual conversations in my favorite coffee shop. There is that admixture of representatives ranging all the way from counterfeit and unconvincing … over to the wonderful expressions of love and witness to the life and teachings of Jesus. So let me seek to give you my Bob Henderson algorithm to help you evaluate among all of these often confusing entities. My algorithm has four components that seem unimpeachably true to the founding documents of the Christian faith. These four are inter-animating and mutually authenticating characteristics.

First of all, the church is a people called-out into communities or colonies (which is what the word means) by and for Jesus Christ to embody his own life and teachings in their daily human lives. This means that the church, first of all is about Jesus Christ. He is always to be its reason, its center, and the object of its devotion and love. It is the communities (or colonies) of those who demonstrate to this present world who Jesus was and what he taught by their knowledge and behavior of his mission to inaugurate God’s New Creation/New Humanity. God calls men and women to be conformed to the image of Jesus his Son, and calls them to live-out that image in the here and now. The church, then, is to always to be a “sweet aroma of Christ” everywhere.

So, whenever an ostensible ‘church’ becomes primarily focused on its own institutional life and forms, its clergy, its communal activities, … and in so doing inadvertently marginalizes its focus on and passion for Christ and his calling … to that extent it becomes questionable as an authentic church. Jesus is the church’s true foundation. Those who are called to be the colonies of his New Humanity/New Creation are self-consciously being created into (what is elsewhere designated) a beautiful Bride for the Lamb of God. So first of all: the church in incorrigibly Christ-centered.

Secondly, then, the church is the community or colony that demonstrates God’s New Creation/New Humanity in Christ demonstrates that relationship by its lifestyle, by its praxis, by its works which are visible to the world around it. As men and women respond to Jesus, and as he comes to wonderfully invade/indwell their lives with his own New Creation life, they then become what humanity is intended to be by the God who is recreating them. Again, they become the body of Christ right in the midst of the larger human community. What does that mean? Well, New Testament documents tell us that even in the most hostile and negative contexts, when we live out Christ’s teachings we create a curiosity in those observing.

Third, the church is the community/colony of God’s New Creation/New Humanity people who demonstrate that New Humanity by their relationships. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples in that you love one another. Not only do they love one another but they love their enemies and do good to those who despitefully use them and persecute them.  They live in a “one another” relationship of accountability and caring with each other.

And, Fourth, the church is a community that is contagious with this incredible thing that God has done in Christ. As some Latin American folk have described it: the church is the missionary arm of the Holy Trinity. All those who are called to be Christ’s church are thereby called to be agents of the heralding of his mission to the whole world. All believers are to part of that mission in the realities, modest or influential, wherever they are.

These four essential and inter-animating dimensions together are useful to me in evaluating whatever expression presents itself as a church. I hope they are helpful to my readers. And, by the way, I have a book somewhere in process, due out in a month or two from Wipf and Stock, in which I deal more in depth with this question of: What on earth is the church? Stand by.

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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