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Reinvent the Church!

(c) text and images: Peter R Green. First published in The Australian Baptist, September 1991, altered October 2007. All rights reserved.

UNLESS WE reinvent the church in each generation, we cease being a Biblical church. Our criteria become the traditions of the past or the models of the surrounding world, rather than the models revealed in Scripture. We Baptists claim to be a Biblical church, to the extent that there is great risk in challenging that assumption. After all, were our forebears unbiblical?

Who perfectly understands God’s purposes? We seldom realise any truth until if has become unavoidable. For example, there were prophetic challenges to the ‘dark satanic mills’ in the 18th century, but it has taken post World War II environmental degradation to awaken the church to Scripture’s environmental teachings.

The ‘new voices of evangelism’ -- people like Rick Warren, Thorwald Lorenzen, Frank Tillapaugh, John Wimber -- call us to wake up to unrealised Biblical perspectives. They may not have all truth, but dare we ignore them?

Warren charges that the training of pastors is geared towards maintenance of the church, not towards revolution. Foursquare pastor, Jack Hayford, appeals for truly Biblical priorities in church life. Tillapaugh says we have geared our entire ministry to the needs of the middle classes. Baptist theologian, Thorwald Lorenzen, says we have taken up only part of the gospel, and are too focused on the nature of the church. Wimber chides us for our loss of the supernatural dimensions of faith.

An Australian pastor, Don Wright, interviewed for a 1991 article in The Australian Baptist (Lifeboat Leichhardt) remarked, “We stop taking risks, and start running our churches like businesses. We need to get back to being ‘spiritual families’. We need to loosen the purse strings, stop thinking like accountants and start thinking like lovers of God!” Thorwald Lorenzen has taken up similar themes. Can it be said that the church has ceased being the body of Christ and become another of the corporations which rule the world? Isn’t that what Don Wright was essentially saying?

The question must be asked, is our focus on, “How do we, together, represent Christ in our world?” Or is it, “How do we preserve and expand this organisation?”

TROUBLING TRENDS
Jesus says, “You seek the Kingdom, and I will build my church.” We say, “Jesus, you attend to the Kingdom, and we will build our church.” Similar, but different... Isn’t this the source of our unhealthy and inappropriate concern for the church -- as a corporation?

Whatever else the Signs and Wonders movement, so closely associated with John Wimber, does, does it not emphasise that Jesus will provide the impetus and the equipping to build the church, if the church, on its part, seeks God’s rule in all things? Does it not say that the distinction between “sacred” (healing and prophecy) and “secular” (feeding the needy) is irrelevant?

The new trends in evangelicalism are calling us back to the realisation that Christ and people must be our twin foci.

This can be expressed thus: The priorities of the church must be first, worship; second, fellowship; third, mission.

Evangelicals often find this surprisingly hard to follow. Using slightly different terminology, Jack Hayford, in The Church on the Way, writes of his response:

“I had not understood why worship was at the top of the list. In my mind, kit logically followed evangelism. After all, I assumed, ‘We have to get them saved first. We can’t prioritize the humming of hymns while the world goes to hell, can we?’
‘...my whole experience in the milieu of evangelical Christianity had evolved a philosophy which made evangelism the god of the church. The components of true worship had been laid at the shrine of soul-saving.
All sacrifice was for the evangelism of the world
All surrender was for the salvation of souls
All ministry was to reach the lost
All effort and planning was to get people saved.
... the idol of evangelism has distracted us from the worship of the living God ... it was hard for me to adjust to the proposition that our first sacrifice should be a sacrifice of praise.”(p 52)

PRIMACY OF WORSHIP
Primarily, worship is the rational response to God’s great mercies revealed in Jesus Christ: the response of total self-giving (Romans 12:1). Evangelism aims to bring others into worship, because it aims to bring others to give themselves to God through Christ. This is never a one-time thing, but is part of a process by which we place more and more areas of our lives under the rule of Jesus Christ. Therefore evangelism is only the initiation of a lifetime of worship, and is subservient to the main purpose of worship. “Man’s chief end is to know God and to enjoy him forever.” Any so-called evangelism with a lesser aim should be named for what it is: proselytising for an ideology.

However, as I John, for example, repeatedly warns, .we can never sever worship from fellowship. A church full of lovers of God must necessarily also be full of lovers of each other. Having debased the concept of fellowship, we have stepped out of the ‘positive feedback loop’ where “...fellowship with God enhances fellowship with each other enhances fellowship with God enhances...” In the same way, revival is re-entry into that loop.

Those who have read, for example, of the Korean revivals in the early 1900s will recall how self-giving to God rapidly led to healing of breached between church members, and how self-giving to God -- i.e., the progress of the revival -- was hindered whilever relationships remained unhealed.

Sadly, in the language of contemporary evangelicalism ‘fellowship’ has come to be a word describing any activity in the church buildings where there is no sermon or collection.

Thus we are alleged to have a ‘fellowship’ tea where half the participants don’t even know each other’s names; we have ‘fellowship’ over coffee where people scarcely speak to each other. Certainly, we need opportunities to foster fellowship, but true fellowship demands hard work, not hard eating -- the hard work of relationship-building.

CORPORATISATION OF THE CHURCH
WHEN WE lack truly Biblical perspectives on these two areas -- worship and fellowship -- we substitute instead the ‘corporation’ view of the church. It becomes, in our reckoning, a business to produce a product rather than a living organism through which Christ touches the world.

In the corporation model, efficiency becomes a god, people the units of production, the organisation the focus of attention. It is against this that many leading thinkers react.

Thorwald Lorenzen (The Velvet Revolution, Australian Baptist, September 1991, p4 ff) draws attention to comments by East German Baptist pastor, Uwe Dammann, who

 “...contrasts our spiritual forebears, the Anabaptists, mainly concerned with discipleship and an existential theology of the cross, with today’s Baptists, mainly concerned with Ecclesiology.”

It is true that we Baptists are obsessed with organisational forms and structures. Ours is a quest for efficiency. The “democratic” model might keep the workers happy, and thus productive; on the other hand, the “autocratic” model enhances responsibeness to change.

Doesn’t funding always bedevil us, from the local church to the denomination and beyone? In the corporation model, lack of funds triggers the responses of economic rationalism; it threatens production, so we increase charges or reduce services. What if we were instead to return to the Body model, where Christ, as Head, is responsible for prompting the ‘giving organs’? “He will provide” -- so we say. Is it, or is it not, true?

Corporations threaten of cajole workers and issue calls upon shareholders. They reduce services which do not yield a high return.

The Corporation model also must suppress those who threaten the “corporate image”.
Hence, information which has not passed through the official filter, and ideas which have not been vetted for their safety are anathema.

When I worked in Local Government, there was always an embargo on information until the Councillors were willing to release it. It was fascinating to see how freely suppressed information actually circulated. There was always someone willing to risk photocopying relevant pages, or to use “X-Ray vision” during the lunch break on some document locked in a senior officer’s top drawer.

In churches, word of mouth achieves a lot. There was an instance where a senior pastor attended an interdenominational gathering on behalf of a denominational committee. The event was not reported because Denominational leaders thought it somewhat sensitive. By the time the story reached Sydney’s outer suburbs, the hapless gentleman had been transformed into a secret Jesuit. So there is a risk of serious distortion of facts when information is suppressed!

The other result of suppression is ‘self-publishing’ -- the circulation of ideas through underground channels. Special interest newsletters, websites, publications -- they all indicate needs not being met by traditional sources. And, when an organisation actively prevents circulation of ideas, the unofficial channels multiply.

A further implication of the corporation model is that major efforts are devoted to promoting the corporate image. The other side of suppression is promotion. The “suit and tie” administrator becomes the public face of the church. Company cars, state-of-the-art technology, tidiness and order become the goals; achievements take precedence over relationships.

RIGHT PRIORITIES
Let’s get our priorities right. Focus on God, be liberated from the need to take responsibility for production! Focus on real, loving relationships, and be liberated to hear each other, regardless of the formal structure. The rest will begin to fall into place!

We need a turn-around if we are to have any relevance to today’s Australia.

One of our major Protestant failings has been to forget half of Luther’s teachings. We are happy to be a church “always Reformed”; we sometimes even make an idol of being reformed. But Luther also said that the church must also always be being reformed. We forget that bit!

Perhaps we are on our way to a “second reformation”as controversial as the last; a reformation which will be seen as heretical and schismatic by those who pride themselves on being bastions of the mainstream.

Chaucer said, “Mordre wol out.” Like murder, truth will out, too. The voices of theologians and pastors and the people in the pews will not be silenced forever.

The choice before every Baptist today is whether or not we will be part of this new movement of the Spirit of God.

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