What do you mean by the word church?

Michael Spencer's recent post, Jesus - Yes; Church - No? Maybe, is a very worthwhile read.

As the first comment says, how you answer that question ("Jesus, yes; the church, no?") will depend in part on what you mean by that enigmatic term, church.

Very few people of my acquaintance these days (ever since I wandered off the Lutheran reservation) would say their loyalty is too a denomination, a pastor, or a building. But in practice that's sure how it looks.

Thinking back to this recent post, I should emphasize that it's easier by far to limit your understanding of church to a particular meeting in a particular place where they sit beneath the teaching of a particular preacher, etc., than to think of church as a network of relationships between believers who are seeking to live out the "one-anothers" of the New Testament.

It is easy enough to order your sense of spiritual well-being around church-attendance when church is uniquely a Sunday morning experience, but the challenge is to be the church every day in all and sundry places. The first commenter over at Michael's post says it this way:

I have often times said “Jesus – Yes; Church – No” simply because Church was not the brother or sister sitting next to me, but the legalistic expectations devised by those of influence. (If you’re a Baptist, there are certain things that you, as a good Baptist should do). Now I understand that it is my fellow Christians, whoever and whever they are, who are the church and to that I say, “Jesus – Yes; Church – Yes.”

David Bosch on the Mission of the Church

More from ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, by Hirsch and Frost. On p. 29 we find this quote from David Bosch:

Mission takes place when the church, in its total involvement with the world, bears its testimony in the form of a servant, with reference to unbelief, exploitation, discrimination and violence, but also with reference to salvation, healing, liberation, and righteousness. . . . Looked at from this perspective mission is, quite simply, the participation of Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus, wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belie. It is the good news of God's love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.

Hirsch and Frost on Letting Jesus be Jesus

ReJesus came in the mail yesterday. Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost are the latest in a long line of folks (through the centuries) who want to "recalibrate" the church in line with the Jesus of the New Testament. The great question underlying their book is, "Why is our experience of church so discontinuous with the Jesus of the NT? And what can we do to change that?"

Hirsch and Frost are "missional" types (as you can tell by their cool facial hair). ;-) They say that if we get Christ right (see him rightly and thus know him better) we will get mission right, and then we will get church right. That's the order they insist on: Christology > Missiology > Ecclesiology. And it makes sense to me.

I'm excited about this book. Hirsch and Frost write with passion and yet also with deliberate care. Here's a brief snip from the introduction (p. 10):

Surely the challenge for the church today is to be taken captive by the agenda of Jesus, rather than seeking to mold him to fit our agendas, no matter how noble they might be. We acknowledge that we can never truly claim to know him completely. We all brinb our biases to the task. But we believe it is inherent in the faith to keep trying and never to give up this holy quest. The challenge before us is to let Jesus be Jesus and to allow ourselves to be caught up in his extraordinary mission for the world.

A Proposal

This from Ray Ortlund:

Proposal. A full-page ad in The Tennessean. Section one. Right hand page. Lots of white space. Two simple words in big font at the top: "We apologize." Then, in smaller font just below that, something like this: "We, the undersigned churches of Nashville, apologize to our city. We have not been the witnesses for Christ that he commands. We are neither delighting you nor disturbing you with Christ. This is our failure alone, and we own it before him and before you. God helping us, we pledge to be humbler, clearer, more provocative and more pleasing to you in the future. If we break this pledge, you will have no reason to take us seriously ever again. But we cannot go on as we have been. The time has come for repentance and revival." Below that, the participating churches could be listed, in alphabetical order, in columns. Then everyone involved could go back to their churches and we could get down on our knees and beg the Lord Jesus Christ to change us.

What do we have to lose? Only the status quo.

Can we talk?

Nate, inspired by Michael, made a list of the things we tend to edit out of Jesus. He's de-editing. Here's a sample:

[Jesus] is more interested in what he did than in what we are doing.

He was not under the illusion that he would never die.

"Repent" was a major theme of his ministry.

He easily and willingly exposed people's sin to them.

He was completely unafraid of other people's opinions about him.

There's more where these came from, so do check it out. I've been saying for a long time, to anyone who would listen, that if we are not brought up short by Jesus, if his words do not cut us to the quick, if his teaching does not challenge us and convict us and even cause us at least a pang of grief from time to time, then we are probably toying with a very "edited" Jesus.

Why do we do this? Why do we never hear the word "repent" in our churches? Why is sin not spoken of as the fundamental dilemma in all our lives, the dilemma from which the cross alone saves? Thus, lacking a robust understanding of the sin-problem, the cross itself only merits an occasional mention. I know scads of Christians who will go on ad nauseum (every single Easter) about Mel Gibson's whipping post scene, but who shy from all discussion of the cross as their fundamental need now. This moment. Every moment.

For these folks, the church experience is simply a happy get together of wonderfully nice people, where they remind themselves that God is very very pleased with them. In their small groups they talk about how to be a success, or how to be a leader, or how to romance their spouses. They quote their favorite "encouraging" Scriptures back and forth to each other and tell themselves they're doing ministry if they wear a Christian t-shirt or something.

They like to talk about their "Spiritual gifts," but when shall we hear about the precious "withering work" of the Holy Spirit, for example, that Spurgeon talked about?

The Spirit blows on the flesh, and what seems vigorous becomes weak. What was fair to look at was smitten with decay, and the true nature of the flesh is discovered. Its deceit is laid bare, its power is destroyed. There is space for the dispensation of the ever-abiding Word and for the rule of the Great Shepherd whose words are spirit and life.

Oh, don't let me go on. I don't know if all this complaining is the least bit righteous, but I think perhaps there is a holy unrest mixed in there. I just don't want to settle for Christianity-lite. It occurs to me that if we must never be critical about church, then we are condemning ourselves to a smarmy dishonesty concerning one of the things about which we ought always to be searingly honest.

Like Jesus was.

The Idol of Community

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of special importance of the act of "hearing" in the Bible. Yesterday I sat down with my concordance and made a list of many of the verses that have to do with hearing or with ears. "Let this sink into your ears," Jesus said, just before telling his disciples that he was going to be handed over and killed.

All this was prompted by my meditation on the first chapter of Colossians, wherein we find that the hearing of the Gospel played a crucial role in the transformation of the Colossians from a people under the dominion of darkness to a community of Christ-followers. The Gospel was spoken to them by a messenger (Epaphras), they heard and believed it, and the fruit of all this was a noteworthy faith and "love in the Spirit."

So all this was fresh in my mind when the guest preacher at our church began to speak about hearing, but with quite a different "take."

He said that we live in an age when the eye and not the ear has become "the organ of decision." People are looking for solutions to their needs "with their ears plugged."

This is cool, he said, because Christianity has nothing to do with words, but with deeds.

Shall I repeat that in bold?

He said, Christianity has nothing to do with words, but with deeds.

This fellow – who by the way seems to be a wonderful man and I enjoyed his sermon very much, even though I thought it was drastically wrong-headed – this fellow went on to say that the way to reach a society with its ears stopped is by being a community in which the love of God is visible. People, you see, are looking for community. They’re looking in all sorts of places. The church is positioned to be that community of love in which they can be themselves and can grow, which is what we are all looking for. The church can be that community through the following three practices: 1) fellowship, 2) forgiveness, and 3) unconditional live.

Finally, we can only be that community by dying to self, like the kernel of wheat that Jesus spoke of. We cry out for God’s help, and God fills us and empowers us by his Holy Spirit to be that community of love that people are looking for.

A few observations by way of response:

1) This is not the Biblical pattern. In the Biblical sequence, vividly described in Colossians 1, community is the "fruit" that followed from the hearing and believing of a message. That message was brought to them by Epaphras, who, by speaking the message of the gospel, ministered Christ to them. He was a "faithful minister of Christ Jesus" precisely because he faithfully spoke the message of the gospel to the Colossians.

2) The suggestion is that people today are drastically different than people in Paul’s day, and therefore different methods must be used. Back then, the ears were "the organ of decision." Now, the eyes are. Therefore, the NT pattern is no longer relevant. I’m just not willing to go there. I’m not willing to displace the message upon which depends, according to the New Testament, our very destiny, replacing that message with, ummm, my demonstrably inferior acts of love and good deeds.

3) According to this fellow's suggested pattern, our community of love is simply so attractive that people will choose us over other possible communities. Shall they join, say, the community of the Mormons, the community of the Buddhists, or the community of the Christians? Is our love as a community really so impressive? Mormons, for example, can make a very loving community.

4) One cannot help but notice that to join a community, even to join a community of loving Christians, is not the same thing as to hear and believe the message of the Gospel. It is simply to join a community. That is why, in my church-community and yours as well, I’ll bet, are numerous unbelievers. Membership in a "community," no matter how wonderfully loving, is not salvation. Believing the message of the gospel is.

And, finally, this is the most important point I want to make today: 5) We come very close to making an idol out of our good deeds and acts of love (or out of our wonderful "community"). I have found this to be a common mistake among us. But our good deeds and acts of love are not the gospel. They almost never, if ever, even come close to embodying the message of the gospel. The only act of love that did so was the act of Jesus described, for example, in Philippians 2. To displace the good news of that act of love with the demonstration of our own community of love in its stead is an act of idolatry.

I’m really quite amazed that a preacher and church planter could give such a sermon as this. That is, I suppose, a measure of the state of things in some parts of the church today. I am not, by the way, downplaying incarnational ministry as a vital part in the transmission of the message of the gospel. I am not forgetting that Jesus said that we should let our light shine before men, so that they will see our good deeds and give glory to the father. But I also remember that,

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Gathered Worship and the Mission of God

I've mentioned that I went to a worship conference last weekend, led by Maine blogger Josh Otte and Gordon-Conwell prof. Gary A. Parrett. I wanted to share a little of what I heard there, partly because it definitely plays into the recent discussion (here) of the ideas surrounding being a "missional" church.

Josh's presentation was called "The Value of Gathered Worship." One of the concepts he spoke of was the way that "gathered worship" informs and strengthens "scattered worship." Under this heading he said, "We gather for encouragement, we scatter for mission." Ah, there's that word again. Mission. It's clear that Josh is one of those who believes that the Christian life is more than getting from God.

At another point Josh said that "gathered worship motivates a Spirit-empowered mission." As you can see, Josh was looking at worship in the greater context of the mission of the church, or perhaps we might say the mission of God, which is worked out in and through his people.

Josh spoke of "being the church instead of merely going to church." For me, one significant implication of all this is that church re-focuses our attention from what we can get from God at church to how we can be God's people out there "between the stop-signs of life."

But that will not happen if worship does not help to focus our attention and affection on God and his purposes not merely for me personally, but for his world. Josh said, "Gathered worship shapes a Christ-centered, gospel-driven community." And here he quotes Tim Keller:

"The deep problem, then, in the Christian life is that we have not thought out the deep implications of the gospel; we have not 'used' the gospel in and on all parts of our life."

Therefore Josh recommends that we know, read, study, sing, pray, and celebrate the gospel from day to day. Our doing so in gathered worship will strengthen and motivate our doing so in "scattered worship," in our homes and workplaces, etc., the other six days of the week.

You can see how all this is closely tied to this idea of being "missional." I've been using that term as a corrective to the sense, so widespread in this country, that church is nothing more than a place where we can our needs met by God. But to be "missional," it seems to me, is to align ourselves with the purposes of God. This amounts to a revolution in the me-centered focus that we always trend toward in the flesh. It is to focus instead on what God is doing, rather than what we need from him. Our gathered worship can help us with this, Josh said, because it "fuels a God-glorifying passion in all thing." Such worship can help us to share in "God's passion for His glory," Josh said, while at the same time exposing our many idols, which compete with God for our praise and honor.

I think the most memorable "take-away" I brought from Gary Parrett's presentation was his use of Isaiah 6 as it relates to worship (and, need I say, mission). Isaiah is given a vision of the worship in heaven. He sees, in other words, perhaps as no man before him, the glory of God, and his response it to see in turn his own unworthiness. How an earth can I be here, seeing this. It means my death, for sure.

“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

But after seeing the glory of God, Isaiah receives the mercy of God. What was unclean is now made clean, entirely by the grace of God.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for."

The next words we hear from Isaiah are quite different. The Lord Himself asks, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And now Isaiah's "woe is me" is replaced by an eagerness to be sent! He cries, "Here I am! Send me!"

This is quite dazzling, don't you think? Isaiah returned from his awed participation in the heavenly worship of God with an eagerness to serve that God, for the purposes of God, on a mission of God's. Professor Parrett said, "wouldn't it be something if our congregation ended their gathered worship with these same words on their lips. "Here I am! Send me!"

What Josh helped me to understand was that worship is not just a pleasurable activity at the start of the Sunday church service, but a crucial aspect of the fulfillment of my mission as a "God-sent" believer.

The Voice of Jesus

I've been reading (slowly) Dennis E. Johnson's commentary on Revelation, Triumph of the Lamb. You might remember I quoted him previously here. Johnson's is a voice you quickly learn to trust, not only for his great discernment as a Biblical scholar, but also for his clear love of Scripture and his pastoral desire to bless the church. In the introduction to his chapter on the letters to the seven churches, Johnson writes:

Seven churches, different in so many ways from one another. Seven churches, similar in so many ways to the churches in which we live and serve Jesus. What one thing do all these churches need to fortify them against the enemy's frontal assaults, to make them savvy to his subtle stratagems, and to make them loyal to God and compassionate toward their oppressors? They need to hear Jesus' voice. His voice comforts our weak and wounded hearts, diagnoses our diseases, shatters our dreams of ease here and now, and calls us forward to the consummation of his victory in the new Jerusalem. His voice addresses us today in his letters to the seven churches of Asia, for each letter is what the Spirit says to all the churches.

I just thought I'd share that.

Mission and Vision (part 2)

Two weeks ago my pastor announced a new mission and vision for our church, and informed us that he would spend six or seven Sundays "unpacking" this for the congregation. For those interested, my church is here, and the first two sermons can be found here. I thought I'd track with these sermons here at In the Clearing, working out my own thoughts and perhaps soliciting some of yours.

Without further ado, here's the new mission statement for the church:

A passionate, Spirit-empowered community, who follow Jesus, celebrate God and expect his presence. We equip each other to serve and impact our neighborhood and the world.

My thoughts: first of all, I'm not sure how much mission-statements matter in the long run. I guess they matter only as much as we want them to. In some way they can serve as a giant organizational "post-it note of the mind," something to which one can look back often and check oneself against. But it should be said that, if this is to be its purpose, then it had better be spot-on. It had better be a fundamentally Biblical mission, grounded firmly and clearly on the core or essence of the New Testament's "mission" for the church.

My first reaction to this mission statement is that it shows the signs of trying to be a catch-all for all the buzzwords of the prevailing church zeitgeist. You have here passion, community, celebration, impact, all in one statement! As such, it seems a little dispersed and unfocused to me, a compendium more than a mission-statement. What after all is the main thing here? What is the fundamental reason for our church's being--as far as that can be ascertained from this statement?

Shall we assume that the most important thing must be that which comes first? Maybe "passionate" is given first place because it is of first importance. But passion is a tricky thing. Passionate about what? I guess I'm all for passion, and I'm not suggesting for a moment that passion about our mission is not important, but here we have passion extolled even before the mission is clearly stated. I have seen much passion expended on many misguided causes, inside and outside the church. To be quite honest, I think if I focus on the right things, passion will take care of itself. My mission is my mission, and if that mission is aligned with the purpose of God for me, for my family, and for my church, it's all the more likely that passion will accompany my pursuit of that mission.

The mission statement proceeds to collect several other descriptors, all of them commendable. Spirit-empowered, yes, that's fine (we are, after all, a Vineyard church). "Celebrate God." "Expect his presence." "Equip." "Serve." "Impact." All these are fine words, fine goals, I suppose, but again I ask, what's central here? What's the linchpin, the one thing upon which the life of the church hinges. The one thing, in other words, that makes ours a "Christian" church?

As a comparison, here's another mission statement. In fact, it's our church's own previous mission statement.

We at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Greater Portland are a community of people committed to loving God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We want each person to know Jesus Christ personally and have the opportunity to grow to their full potential in Him. We are also committed to reaching out to the wider community, and the wider world, around us with the transforming power of God’s love.

One difference I quickly notice is the presence of an actual Scriptural mission statement right at the start. I also notice that the old statement seems to at least suggest a certain correspondence, if only loosely, with the great commission that Jesus himself gave to his disciples before ascending.

Another difference: where the old statement spoke of reaching out to the world "with the transforming power of God's love," the new statement speaks vaguely of "impacting" the world. "Impact our neighborhood and the world." What on earth does this mean? What kind of impact are they talking about? How more vacuous can any word be than this word "impact." If there is a specific kind of impact we Christians collectively are supposed to be having, why not spell it out?

So here's my point in a nutshell. If you need to have a mission statement at all--and I'm not convinced that you do--you might as well make it spot-on and exceedingly clear. Leave out the mushily fungible words like "impact." Be specific. Use key words and concepts that are also Biblical key words and concepts. Identify the one thing needful for a church to be, in fact, the body of Christ.

I'm not offended or terribly put-out by this new mission statement, but neither am I inspired by it. It is not my mission statement. But on the bright side, it's only a mission statement. And who pays any attention to those?

Tomorrow we'll take up the "vision" part, and then we'll be all caught up. Foretaste: my response to the vision is a good deal more positive than my response to the mission.

"Recalibrating" the mission of the church

Our pastor has begun a new preaching series that will, he says, "recalibrate" the mission and vision of our church. This recalibration is a product of much discussion with the elders, and yet it is also his own "prophetic vision" for the future of our church. In other words, it is both a carefully thought out group decision and a vision from God.

Since I have been quietly dissatisfied with my church for some time, this comes as a ray of hope. The need for such a "recalibration" implies a recognition among the pastor and elders (perhaps) that we had in fact drifted from certain practices or emphases that had once been central, but were no longer so. In fact, as we talked it over in our small group last night, several other people seemed to agree with this assessment.

I hark you back to yesterday's post, in which I quote Craig Larsen, who says that the role of preaching and teaching in the church is to transform the believer's personal cosmology from one that is self-centered (i.e., all things take on their importance or usefulness insofar as they relate to me) to one that is God-centered. But it is possible to preach in such a way as to validate self-centeredness on a spiritual level. And this is the curse of the modern church.

So what I am looking for in this "recalibration" of the mission and vision of the church is an answer to the simple question, "What's at the center?" I am cautiously encouraged by this recalibration process so far (optimistic would be too strong a word). My pastor, a man for whom I have great respect, by the way, has preached two sermons in this series so far, the first of these introducing the new mission statement and the second introducing us to the "vision."

Here's my plan. I'm going to blog through this process with you. In the next couple of days I'll get caught up by sharing with you the mission statement and the vision statement that were "unpacked" in those last two sermons. I'll share my thoughts and concerns, and I'll seek your wisdom.

Hey, blogging has become my way of thinking out loud. Humor me!

My Jesus/ My Self

Man, even if Nate wasn't my son, I'd still love his blogging! Latest example from the Desert blogger:

The more I see, the more I grow in the conviction that that Bride of Christ has very little to do with the church. That when he comes again in glory to marry his Bride, and there will be a vast array of evangelists, Bible readers, celebrity preachers, pillars of moral standing, church icons, Christian writers, actors, and musicians, and missionaries who will be left wondering "who was that?" because their vision of Jesus was actually a vision of themselves. And there will be a huge contingent of rejected, addicted, hated on, ignored, freaky, unBiblical, unChristian, unreligious, unspiritual people who will rejoice because the one they didn't even realize they wanted has finally come.

The trouble with therapeutic preaching

Perhaps I came off sounding rather harsh yesterday. Let me explain:

The therapeutic model dominates modern preaching. The idea is, people need most of all to be comforted. They're hurting. They're "broken." They suffer addictions, depressions, abusive relationships, broken homes, lousy jobs. They come to church needing to be told authoritatively that all will be well. They need to feel better.

And so the modern preacher sets about serving that need. And yet the therapeutic model of preaching is strikingly divergent from much--though certainly not all--new testament preaching. In fact, when therapy is the dominant use to which we put the Scriptures, then we will pick and choose the passages that seem the most helpful, and stay away from those that may seem disturbing. In fact, we will not be allowing the Bible to interpret itself, but will be sifting it through a therapeutic sieve. This use of Scripture is in fact a serious misuse.

Now, this is not to say that many people are not hurting and unhappy. Neither is it to suggest that the Bible is not a source of comfort. I have needed such encouragement in my life, and no doubt will need it again. But how many are there who are always getting comfort, but are never for long comforted? How many are there that seem, in fact, addicted to therapy? They come to your prayer group. They tell you their problems (more or less the same each time). You read them some encouraging promises from the Bible, you lay hands on them and pray emphatically. They cry, they feel better. They thank you with great emotion. Next week, they're back for more, just as down and disheartened as ever.

What's more, the therapeutic model is not essentially missional. It seems more often to keep people in a condition of dependence than to lead them out of darkness and into light. And in the end this spectacle holds out no promise to the unbeliever that is not merely a semblance of the world's own rather paltry promise--I can make you feel better . . . for a while.

"The polluted stream of religious professionalism..."

My praise for Eugene Peterson's Bible translation is, well, muted at best, but my praise for his books on the other hand knows very few bounds. I've been reading his Living the Resurrection, which harbors under its generally winsome tone a distinct and rather urgent critique of the church in America today.

The best I can do, as usual, is simply offer a quote. Peterson begins by citing Chesterton:

A hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton protested against the way the specialists and experts were taking over common and essential human activities. He wrote that it wasn't so long ago that men sang around a table in chorus. Now one sings alone before a microphone for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If this kind of thing goes on, Chesterton predicted, "Only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest."

This kind of thing has accelerated in our society and it continues to infect Christian consciousness, where it is most crippling to the human condition. But we are not without Chestertonian voices calling our attention to the spiritual devastation that takes place when Christians lapse into religious consumerism and abdicate their dignity and glory as followers of Jesus. There are strong and articulate men and women--some of them reading these words right now--who are urging and guiding us to go against the polluted stream of religious professionalism that has unleashed this rampant, relentless onslaught of religious commercialism, which commodifies the spiritual life and treats the church as a free market for promoting and selling programs, techniques, and devices to the greater glory of God. I hardly think God is pleased.