BLOG 1/13/16. THE CHURCH: VERY ‘THIS WORLDLY’
The church, which Jesus Christ calls out to be his embodiment in the world, has got to be, by its very nature, radically this worldly. The mistaken (and very subverting) notion that the church gathered for worship is to build for itself sanctuaries as if to escape from this world, is a bit of a contradiction. The Lord, whom we worship, is Jesus: God made flesh, … or as Eugene Peterson has so graphically expressed it: “The Word (Jesus) became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” Christ’s church is called to be transformational in the here and now, in our own neighborhoods.
Church gatherings for worship that are looked upon as some kind of an escape from our own incarnation as the body of Christ “in the neighborhood” totally miss the point of the church, and of its gatherings for true worship. Such gatherings are never to be escapes into stained glass and into some spiritual never-never-land. Nor are they to be sanctuaries in which we escape (as an old Sabbath hymn states it): “Rapt awhile from earth away, …” Quite the opposite. The church gathers together in worship, on one hand to process the week just past, and then more importantly as a veritable staging area for its ‘this worldly’ mission as the present incarnation of Jesus Christ in the homes, offices, neighborhoods, workplaces, classrooms, trade routes, farm fields, waiting lines (that are so common in so many venues), coffee shops, recreation areas, corporate centers, … wherever, in the week that lies before it.
But, alas, somewhere many centuries ago, the idea of the church building for itself ‘sanctuaries’ where the followers of Christ gathered to essentially dwell for a few hours in some pleasant spiritual setting of (what one called) twilight and unreality, became something of the norm, and so—especially in the western world—the landscape is littered with handsome ‘church sanctuaries’ replete with all of the accoutrements of great architecture, stained-glass windows, priests and choirs and liturgies … but that do not equip God’s people for incarnational, salt and light living in the midst of the often intractable realities of one’s 24/7 presence. There s an old ditty that goes: “They do it every Sunday. They’ll be over it on Monday. It’s only a habit they’ve acquired.”
This unreality, however, has taken its toll. As our culture has moved ineluctably into a post-Christian culture, in which the church is no longer a dominant influence, there has emerged a new secular generation which has been totally un-influenced or hardly even touched by those venerable old church institutions. Those venerable old institutions are not going to pass away easily .. they are too entrenched in the older generations, but that older generation is passing off the scene. A new and culturally aware generation is needed. So…at the same time, out of a secular culture, a new and emerging generation of Christ’s followers require a more engaged concept of the church and its gatherings that is not an escape from this world, but is dynamically formed by the mission of God in which, in Jesus Christ, the world to come has ‘backed into’, or invaded this world—the Age to Come has become incarnate in this age. God’s people are called to ‘incarnate’ his divine nature in the here and now. The gatherings of this new generation become (as I noted above) staging areas for the mission of the week, in which they are formed and re-evangelized and equipped for the mission of the coming week … by the skillful teaching of the word of God / the gospel of Jesus Christ, by their participation in its tangible expression in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, by their mutual prayers, praise, and confession, and by their renewed commitment to the mission of God and to each other. … And such gatherings can take place in all kinds of creative venues and unlikely settings. But they are not an escape from their calling to be the incarnation of God in the here and now. They are intentional.
The post-Christian era, what with all of its pervasive secularization, is upon us, and there is no escape from it. But Jesus never called upon us to escape, but to become the incarnation of his New Creation right in the midst of the cultural darkness and its loss of any center. Stand by …
