The Face of the New Church

In my last blog, I wrote my belief about the contemporary church--that it is sick, perhaps dying.  This is because we are obsessed with institutional success and worldly reputation. 

When it comes to our mission, the church has just about compromised itself into irrelevance.  In our passion to reach the world, we have spent our time trying to copy its means, its methods, its likes, and dislikes.  We've been so busy trying to "reach the lost" that' we've forgotten why we’re reaching for the lost.  Instead of bringing people to Jesus, we've made it our business to bring Jesus to them--in a safe, sanitized version that wouldn't offend anyone.  When we see churches that have athletic programs and day-care centers that are bigger than the church, we really have to ask the question whether Christ died on the Cross to give the world athletic programs and day-care centers.  We've made a safe, comfortable niche for ourselves in a society that allows people to be comfortable with us,  satisfying ourselves that we are somehow of use to an increasingly pluralistic or secularized society. 

This isn't new.  The church has been at peace with the society which contains it for most of the last seventeen hundred years--and for the most part, we've been successful at it. The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce calls itself the "city of churches."  Our nation has a National Cathedral, but no official God.  Clergy open meetings of the Senate and House, and pray at inaugurations.  Clearly, we have nothing to fear from such pluralistic tolerance, and no one much fears us. 

The world is changing though, more than we are.  The world is looking at us, and discovering that Christianity doesn't go with perfect tolerance.  We actually have a stand against homosexuality, adultery, and other things. 

It was such intolerance of the secular society that made Christianity the first forbidden religion in the Roman Empire.  Today's universal culture, which mirrors Rome in so many ways, has no tolerance for intolerance, either.  They are rejecting the church, and the Christian religion as being intolerant and exclusive--which (in fact) we are. 

I don't want this to be downbeat, though.  In fact, I'm very upbeat about the church as a whole.  Jesus said about the church that "the gates of hell will not prevail against it."  It may be that the institutional church is dying, but the spiritual church will never die.  Rising out of the old church institutions is coming a new church--smaller, leaner,  less institutionally driven, but closer to what Jesus had in mind.  This new church does not focus on buildings or programs, but on serious disciples of Jesus. 

Faith is the rock on which the church is built--more than belief, but a living relationship with Jesus. The outer shell of worldly institutionalism may die, but the inner core of the committed will go on.

 This is not my idea, nor am I saying anything new.  It's coming from everywhere, from Fundamentalists, Evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians-- from black churches, white churches, contemporary churches, traditional churches, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Catholic--all across the board.  Arnold Toynbee said that one of the great lessons history teaches us is that where there is darkness, the stars come out.  As the old church fades, the lights of the new members of the new church will truly shine.

What will this new church be like?  Personally I don't think it will be "like" anything. It will be diverse in its views, practices, and traditions. But the new Christian church which survives will have certain characteristics.

1.       It will have a passionate faith in Christ. It is not enough to believe in Jesus--we must also have faith in Him--that is, Jesus must be our ultimate concern.  The new church will first of all seek to get closer to Jesus.  Any other pursuit is irrelevant.

2.       It will be a church filled with God's Spirit.  Its members will seek a relationship to God and seek His guidance in everything from the way they get up in the morning to their lifetime goals.

3.       It will seek out spiritual disciplines. Before we were called Christians, followers of Jesus were called People of the Way.  This referred to the Christian discipline of life--prayer, fasting, gathering, forgiveness, giving, and so forth.  The earliest writings of the church outside the Bible were about such things. The Methodists were called Methodists because they followed a lifestyle or method for doing everything.  The Puritans were Puritans because they sought pure lives.  Richard Foster said that spiritual disciplines are not important in the Christian life--they are the Christian life.  The new church must make the spiritual disciplines a real priority.

4.       It will show the love of God to the world. Roman society could not understand Christians. They did not understand why they adopted babies left to die of exposure, why they opposed abortion, why they believed in the equality of slaves and masters, why they evangelized single women, why they refused to go to gladiator games, or why they showed mercy to their enemies.    They did it because they loved. They were willing to die for that love, and they did.   The new church will have to love in the same way, not promoting its own importance, but quietly loving behind the scenes.  The new church will have to follow the old church in this.  We will still be fishing for men, as we do today--the difference is that the only bait we have will be ourselves.

5.       It will seek to live by a corporate rule of life.   The early church adopted rules of life, which were not about laws, but attitudes: charity, chastity, temperance, simplicity, tolerance, honesty, integrity, and forgiveness.  These were a corporate ethos that was strongly taught, and which all new believers were expected to practice.  The new church will need such attitudes in the increasingly secular society of the future.

As I said, there's nothing new about any of this.  It's just a matter of actually being sincere and dedicated followers of Christ.  What's going to be different in the future is that there will be little opportunity for the church to be anything else. We can no longer survive on our sterling reputation as one of the pillars of community life.  We will have go to back to being a small group of radicals in society, without political influence or society respect,  just living for Jesus and for Jesus alone.

I think this is the future of the Twenty-first century church.  And the gates of hell will not prevail against it. 

A Prayer for A New Church

I claim no divine revelation.   I am just observing of the times in which I live.    You may see it differently--that's your privilege.

The way I see it, the church as the institution I have known for fifty years is dying--or at least very, very sick. It would take a miracle to restore the American Protestant church to the health it once enjoyed.

What is the reason for its ailment?  Secularism--not the secularism of the general society (that is expected) but the secular spirit within the church.  The church  has traded its soul for secular importance. 

 The Christian church was born in the fire of the Spirit, launched by belivers who committed their whole hearts to  Christ,  and copied Him all things.  It was a disciplined network of disciples, dedicated to following his ways.  

Somewhere along the way,  it changed.  It lost its taste for the sacred.  Instead, the church reinvented itself, seeing itself as a worldly institution, seeking its reputation in the world as part of the power elite.  Instead of following Jesus' mandate to bless the weak, and the poor, and the hurting,  we became a tool of the rich, the powerful and the self-important.  

The seeds of the church's malaise was with us even in the time of the disciples.  While they followed Jesus, they badgered him wanting to know which of them would be the greatest.  Jesus answered that greatness and earth and greatness in the Kingdom are not the same. 

We're still asking this question.   We concern ourselves with who has the biggest sanctuaries, the nicest choirs,  and loudest praise bands and the hippest members.

For the first three hundred years, the church seemed more focused on the Spirit.  We were a persecuted minority. No one in their right mind would want to join a church  unless they believed in Jesus and wanted to find Him.

Then the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and everything changed.  Suddenly, anyone who wanted the emperor's ear became a Christian as a way of currying favor with the emperor. The power hungry, the glory seeking, and the opportunists flocked to the church. In no time,  the church  became just another path to success.

For the last seventeen hundred years, not only has the  church been a visible presence in the world, but the world has been a visible presence in the church--with the rich and famous on the front pew.  The church built mighty cathedrals in every town,  took part in inaugurations and coronations, had the invocations at sporting events,  and  generally became the safe, civil religion of Western society.  As a result, the fires of the Spirit burned, sharing  its space with the ambitions of the powerful.

The church is not evil, though. It has done many good things in the world.  It has evangelized much of the world,  build hospitals, schools,  universities, etc.  But  there has always been another side.  Church leaders lust for societal respectability, to be the biggest church in town, have the most expensive sanctuary,  the most important members,  the most professional choirs, and have the most eloquent preachers.  Our desire to be important requires big budgets.  In order to impress the world, we must be the world. We have adopted the worldly standards of success.   

Pride has been the downfall of the mainline church--pride in their social status and cultural suavity. They enjoyed being the big churches downtown for.  They feed the poor as long as they don't have to give up anything to do it. They share the gospel, as long as it doesn't offend.  They never saw themselves as compromised, but as sophisticates.  They became what they are supposed to be transforming. The mainline churches and denominations which dominated America today are the sideline,  abandoned  and irrelevant.

Ambition will be the downfall of the megachurches, too--the temporary successors to the mainline.  They are not bound by the traditions of the past. Instead, they are create  new power structures, no less proud or secular.   Their desire to reach a younger generation for Christ is being superseded by  the pursuit of budgets and numbers.

 The world is changing, though.  The big, powerful churches are falling out of favor with the world.  The overall rate of church attendance in America has been declining by some estimated at a rate of one percent per year. 

Every year it becomes more obvious.   The secular world is abandoning us. 

It's not all bad news,  though. There is, I believe,  a new church emerging out of the ruins of the old.  It is not an organization, but a movement. It is not the formation of new denominations,  but something that is emerging within all denominations.  It is not a threat to the power structure, but a movement that regards the power structure as irrelevant.  It is instead, simply  a desire to  get seriously  get close to God. 

Across denominational and cultural borders, there is a growing sense that something more is needed in an indifferent and hostile pluralistic society. The early church succeeded not by superior organization or publicity, but by building on the character of its followers. It invested heavily in the building of disciples.  The earliest books  outside of the New Testament reveal that the early church was far more concerned about making disciples than making converts.

This new church is not some new organization but a new attitude, where being biggest or first does not matter,  but being servants and disciples does. It does not seek to supplant the old church. It will exist within the organizational church, supporting it, praying for it, working alongside. But when the old church collapses into oblivion, the new church believers will be there,  filled with the spirit and ready to serve.  Then the church will be renewed by the Spirit of Christ, and the world will again be transformed.

Let’s pray that the church comes to its senses soon, and stops its rush to be rich and powerful.  It is a path to destruction. Instead, let's pray that God's people will seek God again, and devote ourselves to living as disciples of Christ.

The Fantasy Killers

Last night's chilling tragedy in Aurora, Colorado brings to mind so many other similar tragedies--Columbine,  Fort Hood,  the Texas tower,  the massacre on the island in Norway.  No words can fully express the sadness these events caused to the people who experienced them, their families and their communities. 

But whenever these things happen,  a kind of nation-wide craziness ensues, as people, justifiably upset by the news, grasp onto any reason they can--as if craziness needs a reason.  Crazy people do horrible things,  not just now, but always.  Statistics do not bear out the premise that there are more irrational killings today than ever before.  In fact, the opposite may be true.    We forget about the Indian massacres,  slave executions,  frontier gunfights,  gang violence,  and race riots which have unfortunately dotted our history.  It should not be the irrational lone individual with a gun we fear most, but the rational,  vengeful actions of mobs and governments which have caused the most violence in our history.  Columbine was nothing compared to the Civil War, and last nights tragedy was small compared to 9-11.

But if we are going to look at the causes and solutions for such occurances, let me make three observations. 

1. The right to bear arms is all well and good, but does it really include semi-automatic weapons and gas grenades?  These are not weapons of personal protection but of mass destruction.  Last night's killer did not obtain them legally,  but he did obtain them easily.  Something is wrong  with our enforcement of the laws when insane killers may obtain any weapon they want. 
   Some will argue that more weapons in more people's hands would deter violence. It may--but not crazy violence.  These people want to be killed,  expect to be killed.  They just want to take as many as they can with them.
2. Why do we need to know all about these details?  Sometimes, crazy killers  are really not that crazy.  They just have a differing set of values than other people. More than anything, they want to be known.  The media willingly obliges them,  plastering every detail of their sad, pathetic lives over the screens of this country,  making celebrities out of nobodies.  To paraphrase Any Warhol--anyone can be famous in America for fifteen minutes, if you are willing to die and to kill for it.  These people use their killings to  send messages to the world, and the press obliges them. 
   Why don't we boycott the news for a while, and stop reading or talking about them?  Better yet, just because something happens, does the news have to report it?   Let's keep them anonymous, and focus on comfort to the grieving families, instead of satisfying the morbid curiosity of all the people who have no business knowing about  it. Maybe next time,  the crazies will think twice about going to an anonymous death.

3. Do we have too much fantasy in our lives?  When the Aurora killer was surrendered to the police,  he identified himself as "The Joker."   He wore a gas mask,  which much have looked similar to the villain in the current Batman film.   At Columbine,  the perpetrators wore long trench coats, similar to the coats worn in movies such as  The Matrix.  Recently there have been a spate of crazy individuals committing acts of assault and cannibalism, copying popular vampire and zombie movies.   These people identified themselves with characters from TV and movie fantasies. Clearly, it is no surprise that he attacked a Batman movie, or that he was able to enter the theater in costume at a midnight fan showing undetected. 
   The most frightening thing about modern America is not those few explosions of violence, but the general loss of reality.  Our lives today are not so much the product of either faith or reason, but imitations of fantasies.  We think we are entitled to the lives of celebrities, who become idols, the collective focus of our dreams and desires.  The fantasy world has become so large and so influential that it threatens to rob us of reality. 

The most frightening thing about the fantasy killers is not that we do not understand them, but that we do.  When the real world becomes too complicated and difficult, we retreat into our own dreams, which are sometimes erotic, sometimes violent,  sometimes, heroic,  but never real.  Then, when fantasy becomes more real than reality, we want to act out our fantasy in reality. For some few unbalanced souls,  that means turning a crowded theatre into a video game shoot-em-up. 

But it isn't fantasy.  It's reality.  In the end,  we all must face the judgment of the world, and the judgment of God.