BLOG 2/24/14. WHEN THE CHURCH BECOMES IMMUNIZED (TO ITS OWN MESSAGE)

2/24/14: WHEN THE CHURCH BECOMES IMMUNIZED (TO ITS OWN MESSAGE)

Hey, guys! I hang–out a lot at coffee shops. Invariably, my revealing of my career as a teaching-pastor in the church creates some interesting responses. I’m a fairly friendly guy, and the conversations that so often ensue over coffee are frequently along the line: “How did a nice guy like you function in a church that … [for my conversation partners is such a stumbling-block]?” They will often come up with all of the news reports, or their own unpleasant experiences, or of ‘whacko’ ideologues mouthing off in the name of Christian faith. The church is easily dismiss-able as any potential source of good news to them.

So comes some questions: When is a church? What is its message? What is its form? How does it speak (as the Body of Christ) to the deepest longings of the human heart? These folks who are my conversation partners get their images of the church from all kinds of input: personal experience, social media, newspapers, etc. They find so much of it ridiculous, or irrelevant to their experience, or having to do with another world that is not on their agenda.

I know of several thoughtful, tuned-in Christian guys who were sitting in a pub on the town square one day, a few years back, and wondering out loud what kind of a church could reach, and convey the message of Jesus Christ to the huge diversity of persons they were watching in that urban scene: professionals in suits and ties, tattooed young adults, LGBT folk, individuals lost in their iPhones, (“spiritually confused God-seekers”) etc. There were, at the same time, a half-dozen formidable old church institutions within sight of that pub, all pretty much focused on their own survival, yet with a severely diminished concept of their own message and purpose in the mission of God. Their members were certainly not contagious with the life-transforming gospel.

How would a church become forgetful, or immunized to the passion of Christ to “seek and to save”—God’s great search-and-rescue mission? How do such churches marginalize the whole awesome fact of Christ and his cross, so that it hardly determines what they proclaim or practice, or how they live? How do they become merely gathering places of those seeking ‘spiritual experiences’ rather than embracing the awesome fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself by the blood of the cross?

This is not a new phenomenon. The seven churches in Asia Minor (Revelation 2-3) were already drifting away. Both Søren Kierkegaard (19th century) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (20th century) verbalized this drift in telling ways, as did Jacques Ellul in the post-World War II period. “Show me Christ in Christendom,” Kierkegaard is reputed to have asked of the church in Denmark. Bonhoeffer spoke of “cheap grace,” i.e. proclaiming faith without repentance. Ellul wrote eloquently of the subversion of Christianity.

What is even more tragic is that so many, who inhabit such forgetful church institutions, seem so unable to recognize, or acknowledge that their own church institutions are so immunized and forgetful. Many churches are founded well, but after a decade or a generation, become forgetful, or dilute the gospel with other self-help messages, or displace it with friendly church activities.

Lest I seem too dismal, and on the more positive side, there was a period a half-century ago in New Orleans (where I was pastor), when a group of Roman Catholic charismatics rediscovered both Jesus and the Biblical gospel, and became joyous and contagious with it—whole parishes came alive with Jesus, and gospel-loving priests and parishioners. Still, the institutional ‘traditionalists’ were indifferent or dismissive of this huge awakening. Jesus and his cross are the center of time and eternity. Forget that central fact and the church becomes one more pleasant religious institution—but only questionably an authentic community of the Kingdom of God.

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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