BLOG 7/6/18. WHEN AND HOW SHOULD A CHURCH BE TERMINATED?

I want to introduce a very serious question with my readers, and then pursue it in my next several blogs—maybe this is really a series of questions. When is a church really a church? When does a church cease to be a church? What defines a true church? What is the difference between a true church, and a religious institution?

I am not being cynical here. This was provoked in my mind as I have been reading a fascinating book about the ethical challenges faced by the humanitarian organization: Doctors Without Borders (or, Medecins Sans Frontiers). In their forty years of existence they have, of necessity, had to be continually refining their reason for existence and how to efficiently and rapidly get aid to the victims of plagues or natural disasters. Yet, they admit that it is, for them, much easier to know how and when to initiate a venture into a disaster area, than it is to resolve how to terminate their presence once the situation has been stabilized. Its participants have become familiar with the local culture, have made resolved the crisis for which they initiated it, have made friends, have established routines, … and to consider their agency packing up and moving on is a very difficult decision for them.

Not only am I a student of church history on one hand, but on the other hand I have personally engaged in decades as a teacher and leader in a mainline denomination. I have written extensively on the nature of the church (ecclesiology) as a missiologist. That is a dangerous combination. (A scholar in the field of missiology, David Bosch, has noted that missiologists are always ‘gadflies’ in the church or, in the field of ecclesiology). I have too frequently observed how many traditional church institutions are totally un-evangelized. People love the place, the worship services, gifted church professionals, and so to get their regular ‘spiritual fix’ but never make any connection with what Jesus intends his church to be and to do, … and even more with any connection with the obligations to costly obedience that come with being baptized into Christ, and his church.

This is not a moot question. In the early chapters of the Book of Revelation, the ascended Lord evaluates the seven churches in Asia Minor, and finds that most of them have already, after a generation of existence, drifted in one way or another, away from their intended essence, their calling, their faithfulness (only the two who are suffering persecution are affirmed for their faithfulness). But, the Lord warns those churches which are forgetful, or drifting, that if they do not repent (get their act together) he will remove their lamp from the lampstand, i.e., they will cease to be part of his mission and purpose.

With that bit of sketchy (not cynical) background, consider a briefing on the raison d’etre of the church. Jesus came preaching, that in himself, God’s Kingdom, God’s New Creation, had arrived into their history—God’s tomorrow has invaded our today, or, God future has invaded our now. He calls men and women from every kindred and race and tribe to come to him and be embraced in his reconciling and recreating grace through accepting him as Lord, and accepting a whole new frame of reference (repentance). At the same time, this is not to be a solitary spiritual experience, rather he calls them out of their broken-ness and into a new community of those so called, whose purpose is to demonstrate the actual recreation of the human community into the design of God. It is to be a community passionate in their love and adoration of their Savior, and at the same time, passionate to be the incarnation of his radical love, his radical hope, his radical new creation behavior. It is to be (as one has defined it) the missionary arm of the Holy Trinity. God’s people come to be engaged in a radical obedience and discipleship, … never in passive ‘church membership’—never! … to be continued.

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