BLOG 5/20/13: WHAT IS THE LIFE-SPAN OF A CHURCH COMMUNITY?

Here’s a good Monday morning question for you: If a Christian community (i.e., a church) is a living organism created to be the communal incarnation of Christ, and of his mission in the world—then what is it’s life-span? How long is it viable? How would one know? This is a critical, but difficult question for many habitual church-goers, or ‘church-ified’ folk to even comprehend.

Let me give you my very strong conviction in answer. The church is, in the design of God, to be the community of the Kingdom of God, or of God’s New Creation in Christ. It is to be dynamic and reproductive, it is to bear much fruit, it is to be like leaven, which leavens its context—it is never to be passive or custodial or static.

Venerable ‘church institutions’ may well have impressive sanctuaries and be engaged in many good works, they may have been there for a long time as expressions of religious Christianity, but the question comes: are they alive, and have they ever been alive? Or have religious rites and activities, and institutional hubris and prosperity become their raison d’être?

In the New Testament documents one finds no church institutions (as we know them) but rather contagious communities (under all kinds of egregious circumstances) in which the word of Christ dwelt richly, and in which the purpose of church leadership was to equip every professing follower of Christ to be mature in Christ and to be himself/herself reproductive in the mission of God. This is precisely how “the word of God continued to increase,” or, “those scattered went about talking about the word,” or “And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it (the church) multiplied” (from Acts).

My persuasion? That each expression of viable Kingdom community has but one brief generation to incarnate itself authentically in that specific time and culture and place … and to reproduce itself. This would mean that every believer, every member, of that community would need to be equipped to be passionate about the mission and purpose of God in Christ, and self-consciously engaged in the reproductive mission. Please note here, that all of these folk must be accountable to the community for such doing of the word of Christ!

It’s spring here in my back yard, and I have watched year by year the ritual of birds making their nest, hatching their young, giving flight training, and then booting them out of their nests. Mother birds don’t keep their offspring in the nest, but rather they create the offspring, who in turn will create yet another generation, and terminate for them the comfort-zone of the nest.

All too many ostensible church communities haven’t learned this lesson. Rather, they keep adding ‘members’ and providing them activities inside the church’s nest, and never teaching them to fly. Authentic church leaders do not allow clergy dependent church dwellers, rather authentic church leaders attempt to work themselves out of a job by equipping the next generation of reproductive believers in Christ. A clergy-dependent ‘church’ may be ever so attractive and ‘successful’ in human term, but it is both unhealthy and disobedient. True and healthy Kingdom communities reproduce themselves with each generation. The Spirit of Christ dwelling in such communities makes reproduction dynamic and irresistible.

Answer: the life-span of an authentic church is one generation, after that it atrophies—or maybe the word of the Kingdom falls into the thorns of ecclesiastical stuff and gets choked out!