The Rebirth of the Church

Applying Paul's Vision for Ministry in Our Post-Christian World

Eddie Gibbs

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780801039584
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441241351
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Churches across the Western world have become increasingly fragmented and marginalized, often struggling to survive. Here Eddie Gibbs, a bestselling author and veteran church and culture expert, addresses the challenges of re-imagining the church in a post-Christian world. He gleans critical biblical insights from the early church's experience to help contemporary leaders and churches minister more effectively.

Gibbs compares and contrasts the social and cultural context of the twenty-first century with the first century, exploring what can be learned about the birthing of churches in the book of Acts and in Paul's letters. He identifies the issues Paul faced in order to sustain a movement growing exponentially and considers what lessons might be learned in addressing current challenges in the church. The book examines vital issues not only for the survival of the church but also for its revitalization and rebirth, and provides direction for local churches on becoming agents of mission.

1
Engaging Twenty-First-Century Post-Christendom Contexts

There is an impressive, ever-growing body of literature highlighting that Western societies are in the midst of unprecedented cultural, economic, and political upheavals. This literature is not confined to one discipline but covers economics, political commentary, the business world, education, communication, entertainment, and religion.

In the midst of this seismic upheaval, the church cannot simply bury its head in the sand, hoping that the earthquakes and aftershocks will pass and that it will then be able to emerge and continue with business as usual. The changes taking place in Western societies have been described as all-pervasive, discontinuous, and irreversible. They are having a profound effect on churches of all traditions, including not only historic denominations but also diverse contemporary expressions of church. None is immune, although the changes are affecting different traditions in a variety of ways.

Defining Christendom

As the designations “pre-Christendom” and “post-Christendom” feature prominently in this book, it is appropriate to define Christendom at the outset. The term was developed from the Latin word referring to Christians collectively as the corpus Christianum, the “community of Christians.”

With the conversion of the emperor Constantine and the Edict of Milan in AD 313, the church took on a more political aspect, reflecting the coming together of religion and the empire to present a united front against the external enemies that were threatening the Roman Empire. This relationship was further cemented with the First Council of Nicaea in 325. By 392, Christianity became the state religion of the empire, at which time pagan religions were prohibited. State recognition of Christianity had a profound impact on the significance of conversion for the bulk of the population. By the fourth century,

Tertullian’s primary concern as a leader was formation of a people around a specific set of habits and practices that came out of his engagement with Scripture. . . . This is a missional activity focused on formation of a people as God’s new society. As church historian Alan Kreider points out, this focus on formation was lost in a Christendom that continued to shape the imagination of Christian life in late modernity. . . . As a result, the church entered the long period of Christendom and the focus of leadership shifted from formation of a people as an alternative society of God’s future to oversight of orthodoxy, proper administration of the sacraments, and regulation of specialized and privatized ethical practices increasingly disconnected from any biblical or theological understanding of the ecclesia as the people of God.[1]

Christendom represents a dramatic shift in understanding, of both the church and its relationship to its broader cultural context, from that which prevailed during the first three centuries. The church shifted from a loose network of local faith communities to a much more institutional, bureaucratic, and centralized institution. Christendom named that amalgam of church and state bound by a common ideology in order to present a united front in the face of growing external threats.[2] Alan Hirsch identifies the following characteristics of Christendom:

1. Its mode of engagement is attractional as opposed to missional/sending. It assumes a certain centrality of the church in relation to its surrounding culture. (The missional church is a “going/sending one” and operates in the incarnational mode.)
2. A shift of focus to dedicated, sacred buildings/places of worship. . . . It became more static and institutional in form. (The early church had no recognized dedicated buildings other than houses, shops, etc.)
3. The emergence of an institutionally recognized, professional clergy class acting primarily in a pastor-teacher mode. (In the New Testament church, people were commissioned into leadership by local churches or by an apostolic leader.)
4. The paradigm is also characterized by the institutionalization of grace in the form of sacraments administered by an institutionally authorized priesthood. (The New Testament church’s form of communion was an actual [daily?] meal dedicated to Jesus in the context of everyday life and the home.)[3]

The Christendom model and its assumptions have shaped the church for the past fifteen hundred years. As a consequence, we have come to regard such churches as normative. Now that we are transitioning into a post-Christendom missional environment, we struggle to redefine church and to motivate and restructure church in order to function effectively in this changing environment.

Pre-Christendom Contexts

The biblical focus of this book is on the missionary strategy of the apostle Paul, which confines us to the first century. However, the pre-Christendom context lasted until the conversion of Emperor Constantine early in the fourth century and the eventual adoption of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. During this period Christianity spread from the Eastern Mediterranean across North Africa and from Damascus east. Gradually it emerged from the margins of society and was no longer regarded with suspicion and hostility or even as a threat to established Roman order and the privileges that Jewish communities had established for themselves as a traditional religion. Jews existed in an ambivalent relationship with the new messianic movement. Some Hellenized Jews were, along with the Gentile “God-fearers” among them, attracted to the new movement, whereas other Jewish groups regarded the new movement as theologically heretical and socially disruptive.[4]

What is important for this study is to recognize from the outset that in our treatment of Paul we must not think we can return to that pre-Christendom period in looking for pioneering missionary strategies. Neither must we idealize the New Testament era by focusing on the impressive expansion of the church to the neglect of the challenges it had to face. Consequently, we will focus on lessons to be learned, not models to be reproduced.

Historical Development of Christendom

The church experienced a dramatic change in status and legitimacy following the Edict of Milan in AD 313, when embracing Christianity became a matter of birthright, instituted by infant baptism. Church became an obligatory weekly gathering at a specially designated building ruled by professional clergy. Theological orthodoxy was demanded. Moral values were made the norm, based largely on the Old Testament ethical demands and enforced by law. Within the Roman Empire, under increasing military pressure from beyond its porous borders, a sharp distinction was made between Christendom and “heathendom,” with the latter regarded as ground to be conquered in order to bring about the conversion of its populace to Christianity. These measures radically changed the nature of Christianity as it had existed and spread during the previous centuries.

The primary focus of this book is on the first century, when the church expanded to non-Jewish communities, mainly around the Eastern Mediterranean, through the missionary initiatives of Paul and others. During the following two centuries, Christianity continued to expand at an exponential rate, and in the process the issue of control became a dominant concern. Darrell Guder draws attention to the expanding nature of this problem as cultural diversity became more emphatic in the wake of the disintegration of the Roman Empire.

As Christianity became the established religion of expanding European culture, the problem of control constantly presented itself. Following the disintegration of the Roman Empire, as various cultures migrated and changed the cultural map of Europe, Christian mission was remarkably effective. These cultures rapidly became integrated into the Christian civilization over which the Latin pope exercised authority. Although originally Germanic, these various cultures (Franks, Saxons, Suevians, Allemanians, etc.) accepted (or had imposed on them) the Roman culture of established Christendom. Acknowledged as the spiritual authority in the western half of the empire, the Latin papacy claimed that it could define the doctrinal and cultural shape of faith as Christendom expanded its boundaries and absorbed more and more cultural groupings.[5]

Christendom flourished throughout the medieval period and into the Renaissance with little questioning of the alliance of church and state. Each reinforced the other while at the same time creating tension between them. Church and politics were intertwined, with the assumption that Christian values undergirded society. Throughout Europe, church-state relationships remained close, with each reinforcing and seeking to gain advantage over the other, and reached their height in the medieval and early modern period when churches lived in a dynamic equilibrium with the culture.

Lesslie Newbigin points out that “Christianity had become almost the folk religion of Western Europe for almost a thousand years,” during which the people of Western Europe, “hemmed in by the power of Islam to east and south, had the Gospel wrought into the very stuff of their social and personal life, so that the whole population could be conceived of as the corpus Christianum. That conception is the background of all the Reformation theologies” and the establishing of state churches.[6]

In subsequent centuries Christendom in the West faced new challenges when the legal basis of society became governed by canon law as decreed by the church. With power came cruelty and corruption, expressed in this period by the Crusades, to regain control of the Holy Lands; the Inquisition, to deal with religious heretics, who were regarded as a threat to the social order; and pogroms against Jews. Andy Crouch highlights the tragic cultural blind spots evident among Westerners with the Christendom mind-set: “Right in the midst of Christendom were firmly entrenched cultural practices—consider the Crusades and the relentless persecution of the Jews—that exhibited Christendom’s failure to culturally embrace the gospel’s key themes of peace and God’s particular concern for his chosen people.”[7] We might speculate, however, on what the subsequent history of Europe would have looked like without the cohesive response by Christendom to the military and religious challenge of Islam. Would it have succumbed, as did much of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa?

As corruption and greed became increasingly evident during the twelfth century so cracks began to appear in Christendom in the late Middle Ages, with the power struggle among three rival popes and increasing corruption and greed evident during the Renaissance. These conditions paved the way for the Reformation in the fifteenth century. These three centuries witnessed an unprecedented era of creativity, both technologically and in theological insights, many of which challenged the long-standing assumptions of the Catholic Church. This was the age of global exploration and of the dissemination of information made possible by the invention of printing. It brought about a transition from feudalism to capitalism and the rise of strong nation-states led by increasingly powerful and independent-minded monarchs. Alan Hirsch offers the following evaluation:

For all its failings, the church, up till the time of the Enlightenment, played the overwhelmingly dominant role in the mediation of identity, meaning, purpose, and community for at least the preceding eleven centuries in the West. Its demise, or rather its forced removal, came about when two or three other major forces were on the rise. These were

• The rise of capitalism and of the free market as the mediator of value
• The rise of the nation-state as the mediator of protection and provision
• The rise of science as the mediator of truth and understanding.[8]

Embedded in the Christendom cultural arrangement is an unresolved tension that surfaces in a variety of forms during the course of Christendom’s long history.

Within Christendom one is familiar with two contrasting attitudes: on the one hand there is the attitude, typical of a national Church, which accepts a certain responsibility for the whole life of the community, but fails to make it clear that the Church is a separate community marked off from the world in order to save the world; on the other hand, and in opposition to this, there is the attitude of the gathered community—the body which is very conscious of being called out from the world, and from a merely nominal Christianity, but which yet can wash its hands completely of any responsibility for those of its members who fail to fulfill its conditions for membership.[9]

Such inner tensions, plus the growing influence of secularization and pluralism in the 1960s, opened still wider the cracks within Christendom that eventually pushed the church to the margins and radically changed both the nature of Christian ministry within the church and the church’s mission to the larger community. However, the Christendom cultural arrangement has proved to be amazingly resilient in the face of its weakening and fragmenting foundations. Alan Hirsch observes,

It seems that the template of this highly institutional version of Christianity is so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that we have inadvertently put it beyond the pale of prophetic critique. We have so divinized this mode of church through centuries of theologizing about it that we have actually confused it with the kingdom of God, an error that seems to have plagued Catholic thinking in particular throughout the ages.[10]

In 2008, Phyllis Tickle drew attention to a continuing pattern of upheaval in her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. She argues that we are currently experiencing another such dramatic upheaval and provides a historical overview identifying cultural upheavals of seismic proportions occurring approximately every 250 to 500 years. She describes the “Great Emergence” as a “monumental phenomenon.” In my estimation, her description is no exaggeration, as such upheavals affect every aspect of our lives and permeate every dimension of our culture. In terms of the implication of the Great Emergence for the church, Tickle identifies at least three consistent results or corollary events.

First, a new, more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge. Second, the organized expression of Christianity which up until then had been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self. As a result of this usually energetic but rarely benign process, the Church actually ends up with two new creatures where once there had been only one. That is, in the course of birthing a brand-new expression of its faith and praxis, the Church also gains a grand refurbishment of the older one. The third result is of equal, if not greater, significance, though. That is, every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread—and been spread—dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.[11]

When one reflects on this statement...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Comparing Contexts
• Part Two: Issues and Insights
• Bibliography
• Index
• Endnotes
• Back Cover