BLOG 1/20/16. BEYOND FAUX EVANGELICALS … TO FAUX ‘CHURCHES’
The significant response to my last blog (which questioned the validity of politicians hijacking the designation of evangelical) means that I must have struck a chord somewhere. But it doesn’t end there. Let me appropriate again my gadfly identity and raise the previous question: Can the many religious institutions that operate under the guise of being communities of true Christian faith, or ‘churches’ … really justify the use of that designation? Yes, I know that to try to answer that question runs right away into all of the complexities and ambiguities that are present in the vast mosaic that is ‘the church,’ but it is a question that should be pursued relentlessly by those who are the leadership of any colony of believers who pertain to be the church.
Consider that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, … that Jesus came announcing that in himself God’s kingdom / New Creation was being inaugurated, that in himself God was fulfilling the prophetic promise to make all things new. Then, consider that the manifestation of that New Creation would be a whole New Humanity that would be the present display of the divine nature living out that calling which incarnate that New Creation. The primary New Testament teacher, the apostle Paul, says as much when he states that it is the divine intent and purpose of God to call a people who would be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29 in loc.). It is God’s intention, through Christ, and right in the midst of real life, in the midst of the real world, “of love, sleep, shopping, sex, sex, sickness, work, travel, politics, babies, death, music and art, mountains and oceans, food and drink, etc.” (N. T. Wright)… there are to be those colonies of men and women who incarnate that divine purpose.
Jesus first, then Paul, include all of that under the rubric of the discipline of disciple-making, or forming men and women into that divine image. So what does that divine image look like? That’s not really all that difficult to spell out. It looks like what God had been revealing about his design from his earliest revelations to his people, seen first in the Torah and the Ten Commandments, and then in the prophets, and most perfectly in Jesus Christ. One New Testament writer begins his letter by saying that the God who in former times made himself known to the fathers and the prophets, but has in the recent days spoken to us by his Son …He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature …” (Hebrews 1:1ff.).
So if that is true, and if God calls those who make up his church to be conformed to the image of his Son, then the church should be made up of men and women who are “the glory of God” right in in the midst of all the stuff that constitutes their present context, whether ordered and pleasant, or destructive and tragic. Right? And when that calling is right on the front-burner of every colony of God’s New Humanity, which would be those authentically called the church, then it can claim that designation of church with humility and missional design.
Yet, as we have observed, the church has a proclivity to drift away from that consciousness … and yet still call itself the church, even when that identification has long-since lost any integrity. The church becomes, then, those merely human institutions that fulfill some human need for religion, but are hardly the church. In this week when we are celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. one needs to remember that when Time Magazine made him the man of the year, they commented that King was so unique and effective because he appealed to the church where they were the most vulnerable and expected it the least: “He appealed to their Biblical conscience” as his justification for his controversial assault on racial injustice. King remembered that it was the God who prompted the prophecy which said: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The church is called to be transformational, but its ongoing battle is to keep from being conformed to the dominant social order, so that the light in it becomes darkness. This is the endless but essential task of the church to remember its calling.
