Revolting Against the Revolution
So here goes jumping into the water of my first posting…
A recent reading has troubled me, so much so, that I have decided to use it introduce myself and write about it here. But first—a bit of a context.
Much of my shaping took place in the seventies. A big part of that shaping was the ministry of YFC/Campus Life. The church had largely failed to impact me, except in a negative way. In fact, I went to seminary determined to be anything but a pastor.
It was in those early seminary years that I began to work through my fairly negative attitudes towards the church. Much of what I experienced was rigid, institutionally bound, and of little relevance to culture (and this was in the 50’s and 60’s). I was determined to go back home and give my life to campus ministry. I had enough 60’s blood in me to be a revolutionary of sorts. But something changed, and by the time I graduated, all I wanted to be was a pastor (something I have done now for 27 years). I began to see, for the first time, what a church, led by godly leadership, and focused on the mission could do.
During this time, I began to work through church and parachurch relationships. We use to question the parachurch’s role. But times have changed, and the times have reversed themselves. We have shifted from questioning the parachurch’s legitimacy to now wondering if the “institutional church” is legitimate. Some of the questions go like this—
-Is this institution of brick and mortar and clergy a carry over of a different dispensation—a “temple spirituality” with its established priesthood, that goes contrary to the context for ministry Jesus modeled?
-Is it a product of Christendom—going back to Constantine
-veered us from the incarnational path unto an attractional one?
In his “Toward a Theology of Public presence”, Leonard Hjalmarson adds this quote—“Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship—moved to Greece and became a philosophy—went to Rome and became an institution—went to Europe and became a government—came to America and made into an enterprise”
-Can we carry out the mission without the institutional church today. Can other contexts fill the gap?
The voices raising these are significant and influential, and one of the most recent ones is George Barna’s Revolution. It is his conviction we are in an age that is revolting—revolting from established systems—among them the established church. And that might very well be a good thing. To place all of our hope in the local church (as the context for ministry) is, as he puts it, a misplaced hope.
His rationale is simple—the context of local church as we define it today is abiblical. If we define church as a definable group who meets regularly at the same place to engage in religious routines and programs under a paid clergy who provide teaching and leadership—it is not in Scripture.
What is occurring today are other expressions—people are moving to other “communities” outside of the local congregation, be it house churches, small “aggregations”, family communities, or cyber churches. Barna believes that by 2025, only about 1/3 will rely upon a local congregation.
There would have been a day (back to the 60’s again) that I would have read this and actually thought he was on to something radical and welcoming. But I find his view into the future to be unsettling, even scary, and in the end, unhelpful.
Other voices, like Frost and Hirsch (Shaping of Things to Come) seem to be giving their own eulogy over the institutional church, along with some in the emergent movement, with what they see are major flaws:
-attractional—come to us mentality
-dualistic-separates the sacred from the profane
-hierarchical-bureaucratic, top down models of leadership
So where does this leave us? Let me, as one voice of reaction, suggest where it leaves me--calling for something else—revolting against the revolution. First, we need to quit creating false dichotomies between institutional and non institutional church. Any church that emerges, be it in a pub or a rented school or a house, is an institution at one level or another. Organization, structure of some sort is unavoidable. As Richard
Think about it. From the beginning, the church gathered and structured—for leadership (cf Eph 4:11f). Right at the point of its emergence, it was faced with structuring for care (Acts 6). In fact, right in the context of an apostolic church, radical, revolutionary—they were dealing with mundane issues of setting structures in place to provide for widows. They began to establish structures for accountability, instruction, and discipline (cf 2 Thess 3:6).
My point is this—to suggest the days of the institutional church are over is to miss the nature of church in the first place. We cannot get away from church in all its sweaty, smelly, concreteness. And it is to miss the necessity of these structures. People do need trained leadership. Twenty seven years of pastoring churches, two masters and one doctoral degree, and preparing daily to teach pastoral theology, I still find myself easily overwhelmed by the huge needs of people in my own congregation, the challenges of thinking carefully about doctrinal issues, and how to lead a church to be a visionary institution. Clergy do matter. And people do need a gathering place, and yes, sacred space is more and more a compelling need, given a world that increasingly pushes God out of it.
Sure, we must avoid “institutionalism”—if by it we mean—form becomes more important than function, or attractional at the expense of incarnational. What we do need are non-ending reforms that keep the structures the servants, that constantly check that the wineskins can accommodate the fermenting Jesus (Mark 2).
But we need the church that is both gathered and scattered, incarnational and attractional. We must challenge people to be like Jesus, flesh and blood entering into our neighborhoods. But at the same time, there is an essential place for the church gathered, to be its own context for the ministry of reaching lost people (I Cor 14:25), as well as serving a powerful role of mediating God and the world when it prays. As He did in the Old Testament, God has chosen through history to relate vicariously through the life of institutional, priestly communities—and today—through the body of Christ on earth, where He indwells (I Cor 3:16) and is the Head (Col 1:15-20).
Hence, to dismiss the local church as irrelevant and unnecessary as a context for ministry is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Ministry can take place in multiple gatherings—but not at the expense of the “institutional” church.
