BLOG 9/25/13. WHAT IS THE LIFE-SPAN OF A CHURCH COMMUNITY?

How do we evaluate the authenticity and genuine vitality of a particular church community? When is a church genuinely alive and a dynamic demonstration of God’s new creation in Christ, and when is it simply a religious institution performing rites?  When is it formed by its message, and how would one know? How is it engaged in the mission for which Christ calls his church, and when does it have another agenda of its own? Does a church’s long existence, or tenure, indicate true Spirit-life, or just good custodial management?

Good questions, but no easy answers. Whenever I raise such questions I insist on stirring-in my insistence on including: complexity and ambiguity. Such questions seldom have neat ‘black and white’ answers.

All that said, the question keeps being raised in my conversations these days: What is the life-span of a congregation? This question should raise itself whenever one reads those first several chapters of John’s Revelation in which the ascended Lord Jesus sends messages to the seven church of Asia Minor. There is a sense (as the commentators note) that there is something in the diagnosis and affirmation of each of these churches that is applicable to all of us. But one looks especially at the church at Sardis, which has a name that it is living, but is dead.

But remember: these seven churches were only one generation away from their apostolic founding! That being so, several are told that: their ‘candle’ will be removed unless they repent, i.e., they will cease to be churches. Of course, these many centuries later, none of them exists? Did you ever wonder what happened? Where did the remnant of these churches go? How, if at all, did they continue as Christ’s disciples?

A complementary question might be: Can a moribund church community, or one that has forgotten its raison d’etre, come alive again. Must a church die before it can come alive again? The church’s quest for revival is a prayer for life to return to that which is dead. One of the old hymns states it this way: “Revive Thy work, O Lord, disturb this sleep of death; Quicken the smouldering embers now by Thine almighty breath.”

I discuss these questions periodically with a pastor friend of mine, who pastors a church that he and others planted ten years ago. It has been fruitful. He is a faithful disciple-making pastor. But we wonder together how long a missional community (which every church should be) can continue fruitful and viable and faithful. What happens when it gets comfortable? Or calcifies into a tradition?

Questions rise: Are the members/disciples formed by, and knowledgeable of, the Word of Christ? Are the participants contagious, and engaged in being instruments of the gospel of peace? Can they engage their neighbors in conversation? Do the participants understand why they are called and are they knowledgeable of the realities of the culture in which they live? Are they capable of planting new churches themselves? Affirmative answers to these questions would indicate that they have been equipped for Christian maturity. Negative answers indicate the opposite.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann taught us that Israel, when entering the Promised Land, was instructed to “go back to the boundary” every seven years and remember from whence they came and why they were called. Maybe the leadership of any congregation should, periodically, go back to the boundary and assess their life together in the light of their calling and mission.

I would love to have my readers ‘comment’ back to me on this question. It’s a big one. I once watched in awe as God brought a moribund and pathological congregation back to life when it all seemed so humanly impossible. You may have stories too.