BLOG 5/10/15. WHEN DOES A CHURCH CEASE TO BE A CHURCH?

A generation ago, Gerald Arbuckle was asked as a cultural anthropologist to seek to determine why it was that his Roman Catholic order was diminishing so rapidly. Among other insights, he came up with the discovery that whenever, such an order as his own, displaces, dilutes, or forgets its raison d’être, then that order reverts to chaos. It is always dismaying to realize that some such community in which one has invested oneself in with energy and devotion, could become a non-factor, or could revert to chaos. Communities such as the Roman Catholic orders, or Christian institutions (congregations, denominations, associations, etc.), can and do cease to be of hardly any significance, … and all the while their participants are in denial. (G. Arbuckle, Refounding the Church)

This is nothing new. Early on, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews warned his readers that they must pay much closer attention to what they had heard, lest they drift away from it (2:1). Or perhaps more telling would be the letters to the seven churches in Asia Minor recorded in Revelation 2-3. It is significant that the Risen Lord commands John to write to these and give each of them the Lord’s evaluation of their faithfulness, or lack of faithfulness, to their calling. Only the two who evidently had been under severe persecution (Smyrna and Philadelphia) were commended for their faithfulness and found to be without any rebuke. The others had engaged in all kinds of behavior that seemed to (as per Arbuckle) displace, dilute, or forget their essence and calling to be the obedient representatives of God’s New Humanity in Christ. Today, we see guided tourist trips to the scenes in Asia Minor (Turkey) where those seven churches existed on public television, but the churches themselves have long since ceased. Church buildings become historic curiosities.

Christian communities are never guaranteed permanence, nor are they guaranteed security. When the focus shifts from their calling by Christ …  to their institutional success and prestige, then they are destined for chaos. And, alas! the landscape is littered with those scenes that once had been living Christian colonies, but shifted their focus away from their calling to make disciples, and to form, or equip, all of God’s people into mature disciples in the image of Christ, to institutional prosperity. The result of such shifted focus is inevitably that the communities become immunized to their calling, or ossified in something other than the demonstration of God’s New Creation.

Some of the digital revolution geniuses who have captured our attention in recent decades have insisted that their startups keep their eye on the customer and not on the profits. They have also insisted that such startups need to re-invent themselves about every ten years. They have been ruthless in keeping their companies focused on the true purpose for which they were founded. That is precisely what the New Testament writers were trying to impress upon the rapidly growing first century church.

Churches have a lifespan. Churches can cease to be churches and nobody will notice. Folk can continue to engage in all of the institutional activities and use all of the Christian words, and have little if anything to do with the mission of God.

But have you ever seen a Christian community do a rigorous annual or periodic analyses to determine whether or not they were diluting, displacing, forgetting, or just drifting away from that for which they were ostensibly called by Jesus Christ? As a long term veteran of experiences in a diversity of church settings, I have too often found that Jesus and his mission is not at all the raison d’être, and too often found his name hardly ever named, … or even an embarrassment.

Gerald Arbuckle made an insistent point in his evaluation of his order. I commend it to your Christian community lest you be rapidly reverting to chaos. Or maybe its time for a whole new kind of narrative for the church, and for its formation. That’ll give you something to chew on.

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