4/27/14. THERE IS NO EASY ‘ECCLESIASTICAL ALGORITHM’

BLOG 4/27/14. THERE IS NO EASY ECCLESIASTICAL ALGORITHM

It is an established fact that only a small minority of the populace has the capacity to think into the future. Most are consumed with trying to preserve the past, or, at best, the present. This is also true of the dearth of imagination within church institutions to think other than what they now know and have experienced. Church folk become defensive about the present state of things. Such should not come as a surprise to those who have a heart for the integrity of the church institution.

It is quite easy to forget that within a generation of their apostolic founding, the seven churches in Asia, who are addressed in Revelation 2-3, were mostly quite content with their lives, even though the Risen Lord told some that they had a name that they were living, but were actually dead. Others are reminded that even though their community was quite successful, even rich and increased in goods and in need of nothing (i.e., they had balanced the budget). Some were oblivious to the subtle aberrations to the apostolic message, or that they had embraced within their community alien influences and philosophies. They had ears but couldn’t hear what the Lord was saying, and they had eyes but could not see what he saw. Only the two who were undergoing persecution had maintained their apostolic authenticity. Jesus reminded them that their candle could be removed from the lampstand, i.e., they could cease to be churches.

Such was also the diagnosis of Israel in the 7th-8th centuries B.C. The Jewish folk, for the most part were quite content with the appearance of the temple establishment, of the magnificence of the temple, and the priesthood—but Jerusalem (as one paraphrase puts it) was a city empty and without meaning, having forgotten its unique calling (Isaiah 24 in loc.).

I say all of this because it is a well-established fact that we have passed out of a culture of Christendom, and of the prominence of the church within that Christendom, and the forms and subversions of the Christendom church … and are now in that liminal period between what was and what will be. This has been designated: a liminal period, a time of extreme change, and a time without patterns—a cultural ‘whitewater’.

I could wish that there were some easy ecclesiastical algorithm by which we could measure the integrity of what each of us experience as the Christian church. The huge number of those Christendom church communities of the past, what with their splendid buildings, staffs of church professionals, stained glass windows, and familiarity is measurably diminishing. I always insist on qualifying my remarks about these church expressions by saying that that church expressions are always complex and ambiguous. Churches have a life span. The problem is that when they lose their true purpose, and have outlived their true calling and purpose, so many of the participants are too immunized by the church’s survival and self-promotion, and its role as an institution of stability, that they are unable to even imagine anything other than what they have experienced. They are institutionally loyal, and will “go down with the ship.”

But … back to my thesis: there is no neat step-by-step ecclesiastical algorithm about where we go from here. But among an increasing number of those—especially from the emerging generation—the sense that the church is a true community that is called by Jesus, not to permanence or to success, but to faithfulness to the Word of Christ and the mission of Christ. A more adequate image of the coming church would be something like the team of whitewater adventurers in one of those inflatable whitewater rafts, dependent upon each other, at the mercy of the river, avoiding obstacles, seeking a common goal, sharing dangers and joys, coming to know each others’ weaknesses and strengths, growing in true intimacy day by dangerous day, and so becoming bonded in their mutual purpose of obeying Christ, and demonstrating his light and life and creativity and transformational community wherever the journey takes them.

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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