The Battle for The Church
Photo by Akira Hojo on Unsplash
To say that the church has been through a lot in recent times, would be to suppress the magnitude of reality. Change has occurred at an alarming rate that overshadows decades and even centuries of stable cultural opinion. Not only has the image of the church changed in the broader eyes of society, and even its followers, causing some ministry activities to become increasingly incongruent with the tried and tested methods of the past. But it has also changed in terms of its goals and the resources available to meet those goals as we invite in the age of the online church (something many church leadership gurus were inviting in well before the pandemic).
However, for many the church simply has not changed enough. There is still a way to go.
I have often made the mistake of following various social media accounts that report the extremes of opinion in the Christian world with regard to the church. On the one hand, are those that feel society is influencing the church too greatly and wish to resist any flow of change. Believing that such change would be in conflict with God’s desires. And still, there are others swinging to the opposite extreme believing that God’s desire is to upend the institutional nature of the church, focusing on love and the grassroots of community as we see in the book of Acts. And I’m sure there is a variety of other opinions varying on those two positions. I have my own thoughts about where the church will naturally arrive at in the future, but I must admit that I cannot always handle the fury with which each position argues its point. It sends me into a spiral when I consider how far we all are from the kind of unity that the Apostles and Jesus himself prayed for. But most of all, it sends me into a spiral for I find myself so ill-equipped to even invoke a worthy solution to this growing tension.
The fact is that we all have quite strong opinions about how the church should be, from which I am not excluded. We are profoundly convinced of our own rightness in our vision of the church. It is the age-old internal battle to prescribe. It’s not new. It just seems particularly heightened today.
The dilemma we must all face is that whilst we self-assuredly prescribe our design and function for the church, the Bible and its various New Testament characters, especially Jesus, were not very prescriptive at all when it came to the church. The Apostle Paul was far more concerned about interpersonal relationships within the Body of Christ than whether to have worship at the start of a service or at the end, or even at all! Jesus arguably had the least to say about the church. Only on 3 occasions does Jesus mention the word Ekklesia, which the word church is derived from. One of those occasions is the famous statement made to Peter in Matthew 16:18 “…on this rock I will build my church…” The two other occasions cover the same issue and indeed are in the same sentence, regarding how to address a brother or sister who is sinning (Matthew 18:16). There are no OTHER references to Jesus using this word. No specifics for how it should function. No mention of even a church service, or the place of teaching in the community of God. How remarkable when you consider that He is both the head of the church AND His constituents are described as His body?!
For most, these observations are hardly new. It may only function as a worthy reminder not to get too carried away with our rigid opinions. But what I have found most staggering in my recent musings on the church, is the patience of Jesus to allow all of us to continue in our arguments as we try to possess the concept of the church OVER each other. It’s something we may not necessarily have the right to do…yet it causes more sin against one another than any church design and methodology would. How does He do it? How does He marvellously accept every expression of the Christian community completely aware of all its shortcomings? Does He truly stand so opinionless in His definition and description of the church? And if He is silent on so many things, why can’t we be?
With Jesus so infrequently speaking on the matters of the church, should it not make us recognise that much of what we argue over with regard to the church’s function, design, structure, and hierarchy…may not be biblical, but rather reflective of the cultures of our times? None of which are inherently wrong. You may disagree, and if so I would hazard a guess that your perspective largely identifies with that of your own generation. But every generation before denounces the one to come, not necessarily out of righteousness. And every new generation claims to have a more righteous interpretation of all things ‘faith’, including its reflections on the church. Maybe this is why Jesus is able to have such patience as we rummage in the mess of our own opinions. Because He has seen it all before. At the end of the day, when we stand before Him at the end of our life we will account for our own walk with Him and our tendency toward love. This is irrespective of what church we went to, what style it was, our individual opinions on the church at large, and our efforts to aggressively change it…no matter how righteous we believed we were to do so. The only exception to this is if, in our efforts to change the church, our goal was to lead it to be more faithful in loving God and others.
However, honesty would demand us recognise that this is not at the heart of many of our arguments about church…if it were, would we not be more loving in our delivery?