Ecclesiology 12 - A New Church - Part 10: Top of the Ninth; What it Ain't

    There are two more chapters in The Problem of Wineskins to which we've yet to turn our attention.   The first is subtitled "A Lesson from History" and the second "A Look to the Future."   Like all the other chapters in this book, they are filled with fascinating information and warrant a careful perusal, but they do not add significantly to the subject at hand.  I will therefore dedicate only a paragraph or two to each before moving on to the wrap-up of this discussion: how I personally see the possible implementation of the ideas heretofore discussed.  A reminder to my dear reader is in order: I am not a lawyer, accountant, or even a theologian.  I am simply a layman who thinks about and meditates on these ideas a lot.

    In "A Lesson from History" Snyder discusses at length one particular success story of a congregation built along the lines we've described; that of John Wesley.  I'm certain that Snyder chose Wesley as "low hanging fruit," since Snyder is himself a Methodist minister.  He could have just as easily chosen Abraham Kuyper's movement in the Netherlands 100 year later, or any of a dozen other movements along the lines under consideration.  Regardless of the example chosen, Snyder's point is that these are not revolutionary ideas in the sense of being untried and untested.  I noted in re-reading the passage that most of these movements, while initially achieving a strong reformation of church dogma, usually ended up being absorbed back into the denominations from which they sprang or eventually succumbed to becoming themselves one more liturgical or evangelical denomination, virtually indistinguishable from the many others.

    In "A Look to the Future," Snyder warns of the centralization and anti-individualism brought about by modern technology.  The fact that he is writing in 1974-75 - before the widespread marketing of the microchip - makes for uncanny reading, as the issues Snyder describes have not only come to fruition in the intervening 50 years but have accelerated a hundredfold as computer technology has taken over virtually every aspect of our lives.  Need a spooky bedtime read?  This chapter should do it!

    I will reiterate that both chapters make fascinating reading and once again implore interested parties to buy a copy of the book.  That having been said, let us move on to my own commentary and a description of where I think all this can go. In this post I shall begin by stating a few things we are emphatically not trying to do with this.

    In the past when a charismatic leader has shown up with the idea of reforming the church, the result has all too often been to isolate the followers from the scrutinizing eyes of other denominations and develop what Western society calls a cult (in the broader sense of the word, any organization can be called a cult).  With enough charisma and isolation, the cult followers can be talked into all sorts of non-Christian ideas, up to an including mass murder or mass suicide. This is not what we're advocating here.  The church does not need to be isolated from the world.  To the contrary, while the church should never be of the world, its work is most definitely to be done in the world.  This is one reason we are advocating against individual leadership within the church but leadership through a group of selected elders, deacons, et al.

    To that end, I believe nothing of the church should be done in secret.  The church's books must be at all times open to the whole church, as well as to any legislative bodies (i.e. the IRS) who may need or want to see them.  Far from removing itself from other denominations, the church must be ever open to working with and alongside Christians of all ilk with the ultimate aim of bringing the Church Universal back together.  I suspect this will be met with limited successful; far too many of our brothers and sisters have grown quite comfortable and complacent with their present state of affairs to ever consider something as radical as this, even though the structure we've been describing is completely biblical.  Still, the effort is to be made and any successes are to be welcomed.  We're far too segregated as it is.

    Even in the first century, there were those who sought to create divisions within the church, with some limited success.  Paul mentions other prophets who were most likely, like Paul himself, members of the Sanhedrin who had converted to Christianity, but, unlike Paul, were advocating among the Greeks for a formal conversion to Judaism and an adherence to Mosaic Law before one could become a Christian (the arguments seemed to revolve specifically around the question of circumcision for some odd reason.  Even back then, people appear to have been grotesquely preoccupied by other people's genitalia).  They were essentially adding their own biases to the gospel message just as their ancestors had added their own biases to God's Ten Commandments.  We still do this today, creating division among the faithful as regards politics, abortion, homosexuality and a host of other topics on which Christ himself was altogether silent.  It's a simple rule of theology: either we believe the Gospel message of Christ is true and complete, or it isn't.  If it isn't, then we worship Christ in vain.  If it is, then attempting to add to it our own opinions and interpretations can only lead to divisiveness just as we're seeking unity.

    In that regard, I shall add a second warning, one that echoes the first.  During my "Jesus Freak" days in the mid- to late-70's a movement took place in the Methodist and Baptist churches called the Lay Witness Weekend or the Lay Renewal Weekend.  This was an attempt by liturgical churches to incorporate some of the revivalist ideas coming out of the Jesus Movement (although not all; we again see a problem with throwing out the old wineskins).  The intent was to shake up the status quo within what was by then some very jaded and stoic Christian churches.  By the 80's, this movement had disappeared, not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well.  Following one of these weekend revival meetings, the local participants were - to use the terminology of the day - "on fire for Christ," anxious to start implementing a far more evangelical approach to their ministry.

    Sadly, this sort of program can never achieve a participation rate of 100%.  Once the revival weekend was over and the entire congregation - those who had attended the lay weekend and those who had not - again met on the following Sunday, those members who had demurred found this newfound evangelism movement among their brothers and sisters frightening and abhorrent (it seems there will always be Pharisees among us).  As a result, more than one congregation found itself splitting over the issue of Old Guard vs. New Wineskins.  Since the program we've outlined is intended specifically to spark the kind of Pentecostal flame that Lay Renewal Weekends did, there must be a mechanism in place from the very start to get 100% buy-in from our congregations, or this will become one more flash-in-the-pan movement that becomes little more than a footnote in church history [as, I suspect, has happened among some congregations that have attempted to implement Snyder's ideas].

    To the opposite extreme, I add this warning: several years ago, the church I was attending decided, for financial reasons, to merge with another congregation one neighborhood over.  The merging process took some time; many decisions needed to be made regarding name, etc.  As one outcome of the procedure, the new congregation came up with a new slogan: "a heart for the community, a light for the world."  This phrase was subsequently printed on the new sign in front of the building, on the letterhead of the church stationery, even printed on t-shirts.  I sort of like the phrase, although I admittedly didn't give it much thought until yesterday when I selected that t-shirt as my day's attire.  As I was pulling the shirt over my head and saw the phrase, a new thought came into my head.  I like this slogan, but why do we need a slogan at all?  "And they'll know we are Christians by our ad jingle?"

    The warning here is against becoming too capitalistic.  As the local unit grows, there will come a time when we will have to present ourselves at least partially as a business for purely legal reasons.  But we must always keep in mind that capitalism is a Western concept and everything about Western ideology is wrong.  We are not a business, we are a church.  We transcend such worldly ideas as business and finance.  We are in the world, but not of the world.  Economically, it seems the first century church conducted itself as a voluntary socialist state.  In Acts 2 we read that the apostles set up a system by which they sold their possessions and belongings and distributed the proceeds to all, "to each according to his need."

    Over the next several posts, I will lay out in detail ways I think we could proceed while avoiding the kinds of pitfalls herein described.  In order to do that, I must add a more personal warning.  I am not fond of many of these concepts myself, and that's precisely what convinces me that they come, not from me, but from the Holy Spirit.  As I've said before, I think the best test to determine whether an idea comes from God or your own pride is to examine how well you relish that idea.  The more you like it, the less likely it's from God.  The warning I include here is this: I do not have all the answers, nor do I believe I am supposed to.  While I am attempting to fill in a few of the gaps left by Snyder, I will be leaving several gaps of my own.  That's where you, my dear reader, come in.  The first step in this revival is the sharing of gifts among a group of believers, so I'm hoping to eventually illicit not only more readers, but a lot more comments as we hash this thing out together.  After all, that is ultimately what "church" means!

Pax

P.S.  When I read my statement about capitalism to a friend, his response was "well, it beats socialism."  Okay, that's a matter capable of question, but it is irrelevant to this discussion for two reasons: (1) The subject is capitalism, not (state enforced) socialism.  One cannot refute a point by simply changing the subject, and (2) our modern idea of state enforced socialism is also a Western concept (developed famously by Karl Marx), and everything about Western ideology is wrong.