Enchanted Community

BLOG 9/30/13. A PART OF SCRIPTURE WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR

There is a dimension of Christ’s teachings, and reiterated in Acts along with the other New Testament writings that we avoid like the plague, namely, that the word of Christ and the gospel of Christ have a divisive effect. Nobody likes conflict. Nobody relishes confrontation and rebuke. Nobody takes kindly to divisions between families and neighbors.

So what do we do with such a reality? We try to ignore these teachings as though they didn’t exist. But there they are:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother in law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household.” This passage in Matthew 10 needs good exposition and interpretation, but its point is that Jesus and his message and his mission have a totalitarian claim upon their adherents, so that: “ … he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”

Or, after the stern apostolic rebuke which resulted in the immediate death of Ananias and his wife Sapphira for their violation of the integrity of the community (Acts 5:1 ff.) is the understatement of the day: “And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things. …None of the rest dared join them, but people held them in high esteem.”

Then there is the warning of those who are enemies inside the church (again, needing good interpretation): “But they went out that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” (I John 2:19). This warning says that all is not always peace and joy inside the church, since there are those who are there to corrode the church from the inside.

Isn’t this a happy blog?

Does this put a damper on the fact that Jesus gives us his joy? Not at all. It simply reminds us that the church is called out of the dominion of darkness (which is existentially very real) and into the dominion of Light (God’s dear Son), so that there is always that contextual presence of alien personalities who infiltrate and have a form of godliness but deny the power thereof. Or as Jesus says: “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven …” There is too often the community formed by (what Bonhoeffer calls) ‘cheap grace,’ which preaches the promises but not the demands of the gospel. It is our obedience to the teachings of Christ with all of their transformative power that makes us instruments of Light in this dark world … and such can cause multiple tensions, conflicts, and the offense of the cross.

Ah! But the grace of God is greater. When the darkness seems so very dark, “ … (we) rest on his unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale (our) hope anchor holds within the veil.”

We need to be reminded that we are called to engage always in the warfare between that darkness and that Light, but in so doing to always be the glory of God, i.e., “the radiant display of the divine nature,” to borrow from Gregory Boyd’s teaching. In the very midst of such painful episodes, we always need to be exhibiting the fruits of the Holy Spirit (cf. Galatians 5:22-24), to be those out of whose heart flow rivers of living water.

“But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33

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.

BLOG 9/23/13. “YOU’VE WRITTEN BOOKS? … WOW!”

Because I’m an octogenarian and because I’ve been off the public stage for a long time, and was never famous in the first place, and that my introverted nature has intentionally kept something of a low profile, it comes as a surprise to many of my conversation partners at coffee shops or in the pub, or even in after-church conversations, that I am a writer. In recent months I’ve gotten a response something like this a number of times: “You’ve written books? Wow! Where can I get them?” Or when the find that I was a teaching-pastor in the church for many years: “I’d love to have heard you preach.”

Allow me, then, to be a bit self-promoting here.

There actually are about eighty of my sermons available on a web-site: www.sermongold.com. A good friend, Craig Chapman, who is both a musician and a music production manager living in Wisconsin (because he and his wife had been encouraged by my teaching, and the life in my congregation years ago) actually took the initiative to retrieve about 80 sermons from several different locations, clean them up, digitalize them, and then post them on this sermongold.com. website. There are also some other really good sermons by others on that site. Look at the right hand sidebar for Robert T. Henderson.

I also currently have five books in print (or reprint) by Wipf and Stock Publishers of Eugene, Oregon, and available also from Amazon.com. (a couple in digital form). The earliest of these is entitled: A Door of Hope: Spiritual Conflict in Pastoral Ministry, and is the only one of the five specifically written for pastors/clergy. The next in sequence is: Subversive Jesus Radical Grace: Relating Christ to a New Generation, and is something of the journey of a young, recent graduate in environmental engineering named Chip as he, out of curiosity and with no special Christian interests, wanders into an Episcopal Church, and so into a personal contact that ultimately leads him into an encounter with the Christian faith as he is embraced by a small group of sensitive Christian folk. This young man, Chip, is more composite than fictitious as he embodies numerous conversations I have had over many years. This has just recently been republished, and is a favorite of mine.

Then comes my most recent trilogy on the subject of the church, or the field of ecclesiology. More specifically I write in the field of missional ecclesiology having to do with the place of the church in the gospel of Jesus Christ (or the gospel of the Kingdom of God) and in the mission of God in the world. The first deals with the ‘what’ is the church: Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church.

That was followed by a second work in the trilogy on the ‘why?’ of the church: Refounding the Church From the Underside. Each of these books is written in dialogue with (again) a composite Millennial-age person whom I have named Alan (along with some of this friends). This becomes important because the Millennial generation is much more detached from traditional forms, and is asking really good questions about the purpose of the church, and about its form, and about one’s participation.

The most recent book in the trilogy is another in the dialogue with Alan, and has to do with the church’s proclivity to regress into a community that is more human religion (“religious Christianity” as Bonheoffer calls it), and why that is. This one is entitled: The Church and the Relentless Darkness. So this, again, is a work on spiritual conflict, but written for my younger and inquisitive and honest friends.

Now you know all there is to know about my writings and my sermons. If interested, you know where to look. I can hope they may enrich your understanding of the mission of God in the world.

BLOG. 9/19/13. PART II: A DIS-EVANGELIZED CHURCH?

In my last Blog I raised the phenomenon of the possibility of a church being dis-evangelized. Be aware that this always takes place quite unconsciously on the part of a particular Christian community—it is a drift back into darkness under the guise of religious Christianity (as designated by Bonhoeffer). Let me give you a couple of experiences out of my own experience.

First there was a church, which was made up of folk who had retired into that lovely town from successful careers in business, and had been members and leaders of prominent churches in the Northeast and Mid-west. Great folks. Faithful participants. Good friends. I had been zooming along preaching from the Book of Acts, about how the church was growing exponentially in those early days and how the word went everywhere, and folk were being converted daily. Everyone in the congregation thought this was great.

But then … I thought it would be purposeful to let my folk experience conversations in which they shared their own faith and its meaning for themselves with each other. Thereupon I asked them to find a conversation partner or two near them and for ten minutes, or so, do exactly that. Some few did it with great excitement, but for the most part there was a combination of consternation, affront that I would propose such an exercise, and a few expressions of downright anger at me for embarrassing them.

Question: How can such a basic exercise of the Christian life as that of sharing “a reason for the hope” that is in us (cf. I Peter 3:15-16) be an embarrassment? Answer: Dis-evangelization, or claiming to be a disciple of Jesus but missing the meaning and thrill of the faith to which he has called us.

Second example: My wife and I were visiting a theological seminary, and were invited to a gourmet dinner with two of our good faculty friends at one of their homes. The three of us ‘clergy-types’ were zooming all over the place doing theological and professional talk, as is our wont to do—when my dear wife, who listened more than she talked, at a break when our conversation stopped for a moment, leaned across the table and asked: “Marion, how did you come to know Jesus Christ?” His mouth dropped open, and there was a long pause, and then he smiled and said: “Do you know, Betty, I’ve been a tenured professor at this seminary for years, and that is the first time anybody ever asked me that question. Isn’t that revealing?” And then he proceeded to tell her about his response to Jesus that had brought him to teach New Testament there. That was one episode, among many, that persuaded me that that same seminary was basically dis-evangelized, or a mission field in itself. It had drifted back into the darkness.

And the third, also about a seminary: I was a regular visitor to one of our denominational seminaries, and always joined the seminary community in their daily chapel services. It dawned on me after several of these visits, and services led by students, that they were liturgically quite impressive—except for the fact that the name of Jesus was never uttered. How to have a worship service and inadvertently forget Jesus, the reason for it all? Dis-evangelization, a Satanic wile.

When that flame of passion for Jesus and the gospel grows dim, and nobody seems to notice, or when a congregation gets caught up in other (in themselves) good church agendas … then the dis-evangelization has done its work. Yes, when a community is no longer passionate about the mission and message of God in Christ, then the dominion of darkness reasserts itself.

Tragic, but all too common.

BLOG 9/16/13. WHAT ABOUT A DIS-EVANGELIZED CHURCH?

The word gospel (or evangel, as in evangelical or evangelism) has been so totally emasculated of, and distorted from, its true meaning that one hardly dares use it with any hope of folk comprehending what you’re talking about. The root Greek word has the whole connotation of an overwhelmingly joyous and thrilling announcement that has inescapable implications for the hearers. It is not a Christian word per se, but the church appropriated it because it came the closest to carrying the meaning of the coming of Jesus, the Son of God to reconcile us, and all creation, unto God the Father. That is why the first four books of the New Testament are designated as ‘gospel’ accounts.

After the tragic and confusing and dismaying events that took place with the crucifixion of Jesus, and the subsequent resurrection, it slowly dawned on Jesus’ disciples what he had been saying all along about the necessity of his cross in order to reconcile us to God. Then, after the events at the Jewish Pentecost celebration, when the Spirit of God came upon the bewildered disciples in the upper room, they were absolutely and irrepressibly and joyously evangelized, i.e., they simply could not keep it to themselves, but rushed out to announce it to all and sundry in the streets, even at the risk of their lives.(That doesn’t sound like many churches I know!)

You get the early accounts of how “the word went everywhere” and multitudes believing in Jesus, including priests. People sold their possessions, left their homes, lost their lives, and incarnated a whole new kind of humanity because of the ultimate (cosmic) and thrilling reality of what had happened in and by the coming of Jesus.

And yet … go down the Biblical road about one generation, and the church had begun to lose the thrill, and began to be dis-evangelized. Look at the letters sent to the seven churches of Asia Minor by the Risen Lord Jesus (in Revelation 2-3) and you will see how all but two (two that were being persecuted severely) of them had begun to ‘lose it’—they had gotten distracted by doctrinal disputes, or pre-occupied with their own inner life, forgetful of their first love, or incorporating the errors and immorality of the dominant social order into their own communal life. They are commanded by the Lord to remember who they were, and why they were called, and what they are to be … or cease to be churches. They had inadvertently drifted into becoming communities with other agendas than the thrilling and transformational and reconciling event of Jesus.

I have a thesis, which I will test with my readers: that a church formed by the true gospel, has a life-span of about one generation, and then becomes familiar with the gospel words, comfortable with the gospel traditions, appreciative of a place to make social friends … but where many of the members have not had a living and personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Tell them this, and they will resent your saying it, but it is true all the same. That church has become no longer contagious with the message. The members are no longer are motivated by an irrepressible desire to get the thrilling news out in conversations with their neighbors and friends. Those professing to be Christian only know how to ‘go to church meetings’ but not how to live out, or incarnate, God’s New Creation in the vicissitudes of their daily lives.

I’ve observed this phenomenon take place, so that the church is all too much a mission field, or an unreached people group in itself. Where the church is evangelized it grows spontaneously, and is a people continually thrilled and transformed by their passion for Jesus and his mission.

Maybe I’ll give you a couple of graphic examples along the way in these Blogs. I’d love to hear comments of your experience.

BLOG 9/12/13: EQUIPPING PASTORS? DON’T COUNT ON IT!

What in the world is a ‘pastor’ anyway? In one of the most enlightening passages in the New Testament that give insight into the form and purpose of the church, it is stated that it is the Risen Lord’s design that all of God’s people (also called ‘saints’) are to be equipped for their daily ministry in real life as mature and discerning participants and collaborators in the mission of God in the world (Ephesians 4:11-16).

Read that paragraph over again, please. Get it? All of God’s people are to be informed, communicative, mature, contagious, creative, and fruitful participants in God’s mission to reconcile the world to himself in the realities of life, i.e., in the lowest and most seemingly insignificant or in the most visible and prestigious places.

To this end Christ furnishes the community of his people with four necessary and symbiotic equipping gifts: apostle, prophet, evangelist, and teaching-shepherd (or, teaching-pastor). This final gift is the one that gives context and substance to the other three, and has to do with a clear understanding of the word, or teachings of Christ. (I commend to you my: The Church and the Relentless Darkness, pp. 137ff for further elaboration on these gifts.)

This passage is very urgent, pragmatic, and essential for the church, its mission and its message … but has been so often subverted and convoluted (bastardized?) into some notion of ‘clergy’, or ‘minister of word and sacrament’ (having nothing to do with gifts or equipping), which, rather than being equipping, it becomes rather: custodial, priestly, and creating an unequipped (or ill-equipped) passive company of ‘church members’ doing ‘churchy’ things, as though this were the purpose of it all.

But the good news is that the emerging generations (Millennials and 20-/20s) resist this hierarchical (from the top down) pattern either in business or in the church. These insist on being both collaborators and participants engaged in the process, active in dialogue, seeking common goals. They can be unimpressed by, and dismissive of ‘clergy’.

One has only to look at those church communities that are growing and contagious with the faith to find examples of this. And where those who are, ostensibly, the church professionals are not fulfilling this role of equipping, then God’s serious believers in Christ will find alternative fellowships and resources and assist each other in becoming equipped to maturity, and to ministry.

In a former age, the church was basically illiterate and the term parson (the person) was given to the pastor since he was the only literate person in the community and all were dependent on him (not many ‘hers’ in that era) to read and teach them scripture. No more. There are huge resources available to any even moderately educated followers of Christ, so they are not dependent on some weekly encounter with a pulpit, which may or may not be helpful.

Up front, I am partial to the ESV Study Bible, and The Word in Life Study Bible. Add to those InterVarsity Press’s New Bible Commentary (which will set you back about $55, but is well worth it since it is a marvelous, help both in content and interpretation), and its companion volume, the New Bible Dictionary (much less expensive). These are great tools. Add to these your access to Google, and Wikipedia and you are no longer dependent on church leaders who have forgotten the mission and message. And you can have great discussions on scripture and your daily ministries over coffee or beer—what a marvelous way to become mature participants in the mission of God!

BLOG. 9/9/13: “WHEN LIFE DEALS YOU CARDS YOU’D RATHER NOT PLAY …”

I think it was Johnny Cash who used to sing about life dealing us cards we’d rather not play. That dilemma seems particularly relevant today. I’m certain that our president and many world leaders with any kind of ethical standard feel that way about the crisis in Syria. Life seems to come replete with quandaries for which there seems no satisfactory solution. This is not only true on the larger world scale, as with so much in the Middle East, but it is also true in our daily lives, in the school system, on the economic scene, in differences with our neighbors and close friends.

The much loved devotional writer of the last century, Oswald Chambers, made the comment that has found a lodging in my memory which is that “the basis of our human experience is the tragic,” or in other words, that the whole fall of the human race into a rebellion against its creator at the beginning, has created a situation where God’s intended shalom seems abnormal. Broken relations, estrangement, moral and ethical dilemmas, unexpected tragedies and untended misunderstandings become so much the norm … unless one leads an abnormally isolated life.

And, all too often, church communities can attempt to be an escape from these realities. I think, for instance, of the Sabbath hymn I grew up with: “ … rapt awhile from earth away, … have a foretaste inly given how they worship thee in heaven.” It really was a good hymn, by the way, but the truth is that our worship of God, whose world this is, should thereby be radically this worldly.

Say you’re a guy who takes his neighbors seriously, keeps up with the news, agonizes over moral wrongs on the public stage (not to mention the evidences of cultural darkness), hangs out in coffee shops where communities often meet and communicate, cares about his/her working associates … and you go to a ‘worship service’ where you can find no connection between what is taking place there in that service with those realities from which you have come and to which you will return when you leave that ‘worship service.’

Why is that? What has been the purpose of it all? “This is my Father’s world, and let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet,” goes the hymn. God has called us to be his ambassadors, his agents of reconciliation in a very real world, which is his world, after all.

Yes, and in that world our role is not always simple, but rather complex. Our “love your neighbor” calling can be dicey. Our presence in corporate life with those who operate with a different set of values, or worships cultural idols, can be ever so complicated. Yet it is there, right in the midst of all the ‘stink and stuff’ that we are to be salt and light, to be the sons and daughters of the Light. All we have to do is to read the scriptures to realize that the context in which the most of those Biblical documents was one of very undesirable and troublesome social, political, economic, ethical, and personal realities.

Johnny Cash (or whoever) had it right: “ … life deals us cards we’d rather not play,” but that’s so often where we find ourselves. Our Refuge and Strength is present with us right there! It is right there that we are to be the light of the world.

BLOG. 9/5/13: DISCIPLES THE OTHER 100+ HOURS A WEEK?

So we are called to be disciples. So we spend, maybe, four hours a week in church gatherings, and maybe fifty-six or so hours sleeping. That leaves about 108 hours in which we are to be salt and light in the real stuff of life. What does that mean? That’s the real test. Anyone can ‘go to church’, sit in a seat and listen to a sermon, or be on a church committee and engage in ‘churchy’ activities’ (even the proliferation of unconverted believers who inhabit most church communities can do that).

But how to function joyfully and fruitfully 24/7 as disciples, say, a single mom, or a special education teacher, or an astro-physicist, or a truck driver, or a sanitation worker, or a bank manager, or an environmentalist, or a graduate student, or you-name-it? That’s the real test, given the tensions and demands and ethical challenges of our lives. How to be incarnations of the Light, the image of God in the midst of so much that is broken? … that is where those who are disciples display the excellence (II Peter 1:3) to which we are called. And who equips us for such?

I heard a Labor Day sermon once in which the preacher spoke of “six days shalt thou labor” and concluded that our purpose was to “glorify God and enjoy him forever” (Westminster Shorter Catechism). No one can argue with the catechism … except that it doesn’t answer the questions I’ve raised above. It would be like someone telling you to “catch the train.” Sure: what train? Train to where? Where’s the station? What’s the purpose of catching the train? What’s the fare?

The exhortation to catch the train leaves all those questions unanswered (ridiculous illustration, admittedly). But, it is the same with a well-meaning exhortation to glorify God. First off: what is the glory of God? Then, what does it mean to glorify God? What are the pieces of that? How do I apply that to my 24/7 life in the midst of all the ‘crap’ (or worse) that is so often a part of our daily lives in this present reality?

Gregory Boyd has defined glory as: “the radiant display of the divine nature,” which would, in turn, mean that we glorify God by radiantly displaying God’s nature in our human lives. This is exactly what Peter is indicating in the passage noted above, namely that God’s “divine power has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness, … precious and very great promises so that through them (we) become partakers of the divine nature having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (II Peter 1:3-4). That escape, please note, requires that we also live a life of repentance in which we always putting off all of the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural idols and habits by which we are naturally formed, i.e., materialism, consumerism, sensualism, conformity to the dominion of darkness, etc. It requires that we also know how to be always putting on the garments of light.

A good question with which to conclude here: Do our 3-4 hours in church gatherings give us practical equipping for such a radiant display of the divine nature in our 24/7 lives? If not, then they are questionable in God design to form in us the divine nature. If the church gathered does not equip us for our ministry in the ‘Monday morning world’, then who does?

Maybe we’re left on our own!

BLOG 9/2/13: SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL GRACE

The other day I was at one of my favorite coffee shops and got into a chance conversation with one of the staff there, who is a very affable guy, also a professional actor, and a keen mind. In the course of the conversation I asked his name, and he was a Robert just as I am. I remarked that I was an author, and that even thought I went by the name ‘Bob’ with my friends, that I had to use my full name in publishing since there were a gazillion ‘Bobs’ on Amazon. So, he naturally asked me what I wrote about. That led to a most scintillating conversation with a neat guy, typical young urban professional, product of a post-Christian culture, and whose only exposure to the Christian faith was through the media, which meant that he had read about all the strident right-wing voices that call themselves ‘Christian’ or ‘evangelical’.

It so happened that this was the day after the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington, so I was able to feed in that if one took the teachings of Jesus seriously, that they were very radical stuff, and had a social ethic that was counter-cultural through and through. I reflected with him that it was this faith that formed Martin Luther King, Jr., and that his stirring quote from the minor prophet: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” spoke of the intense passion of the Christian faith in its integrity in facing the social, economic, and political issues, and injustices, of the day as it incarnates the teaching of Jesus, and of God’s New Creation (Kingdom).

He rose to that, and the conversation got very productive. I told him I had written on this very subject and he was intrigued, and punched my name into his iPhone saying he would check it out. This says that there are many doors into the hearts and minds of the ‘sojourners’ (a designation given by one writer to the spiritually confused god-seekers).

Which leads me to the point of this Blog. I am rejoicing that the good folk at Wipf and Stock Publishers (Eugene, OR) have reprinted now an earlier book of mine entitled Subversive Jesus, Radical Grace: Relating Christ to a New Generation.

I commend it to my readers. Ron Sider, in commenting on it when it was published originally in 2001, wrote: “Henderson gives substance to words often ignored or trivialized in contemporary Christianity: radical obedience, costly discipleship, repentance, idolatry, dominion of God, servanthood, and holiness. Henderson’s commitment to a holistic agenda is timeless—an important read for disciples of any generation.”

One of his colleagues in Evangelicals for Social Action (Phil Olson) added: “In a narrative style, Henderson supplies an undercover systematic theology that challenges, confronts, and confounds the postmodern mindset. This youthful veteran pastor and theologian leaps the generation gap and sets forth a rigorous evangelistic agenda for a new millennium.”

I’m thrilled that it is in reprint. I commend it as part of the ongoing conversation of these Blogs.

Peace!

BLOG. 8/28/13. THE PRIMARY FORM OF THE CHURCH: SMALL

When we’re looking at the church with eyes that see beyond today, and beyond this present adult generation, we’re looking at the wonderful prospect of a fresh generation that bids well to reconceive the church in a form much more in line with Biblical teachings. I’m referring to both the Millennial, and the iY, or 20/20, generations.

Here’s why I make such a puzzling statement. One of the primary purposes of the church is to be the demonstration of God’s recreation of the true human community, God’s new creation community. Remember that Jesus taught us that it was it was he who would his church (translate: ‘called-out people’), but then never gave us a pattern, or template, for how that would take place. But one thing he insisted upon was that his called-out people were to love one another as the Father had loved him, and as he, in turn, had loved them. That would be how the world would know that we were his disciples. Note that!

We’re talking here of costly, sensitive, encouraging, authentic, faithful love in which his people were both responsible for, and accountable to each other. It would be a community that would reflect in the realities of its life the very divine nature of God. To use another Biblical word, it would be mutually edifying, or committed to building each other up in their calling to be the family of God—not in some ‘spiritual’ or theoretical or superficial way, but in all of the realities of their mutual life together: financial, familial, social, environmental, sexual, emotional, etc. realities.

Now, face it! This simply cannot take place in a large, somewhat impersonal religious assembly, or institutional form of the church (they may have their place, but are not the primary form). It simply cannot happen there. It can only take place in a quite small group in which all of the members have access to the names, faces, stories, and existential realities of each other’s lives. It has to be (in the best sense of the word) intimate, hence the use of the Greek word koinonia in the New Testament. You note that early on, after the thousands turned to Jesus and were baptized at Pentecost, that in addition to public meetings, they met in homes where they were in fellowship/koinonia praying together, rehearsing the apostles’ doctrines, eating together, and in which context no one consider his possessions his own, but made them available to the needs of the others.

This is the clue: a group small and intimate enough to accept the responsibility of each other, in learning, in prayer, and in that beautiful display of ‘one another love’ that was a demonstration of New Creation/Kingdom community.

Our calling by Christ, is a call out of our privatism, our individualism, our self-focused life, and into the wholesome, robust, authentic community which has been God’s intention for the human community all along … and that kind of community flows naturally out of our embrace within the intimacy of the Trinitarian community through Christ.

The Millennials are, according to many studies, looking for authentic relationships, for purpose and meaning and mission in the context of true community. Such are willing to be both responsible for each other and accountable to each other. So a true church for them may be more such a gathering of disciple-friends around a table at the coffee shop, than in some vast and impressive but impersonal religious institution. Not only so, such a form is more Biblical!