Being Church

Reflections on How to Live as the People of God

Alexander

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894018
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What modern church doesn't call itself a community? Yet for how many is it real? How many churches form disciples intimately connected enough to call themselves Christ's body? How many form disciples who know the relational arts that create a robust unity? How many form disciples practiced in the ways of sacrificial love?Pastor John Alexander, a thirty-year veteran of living in Christian communities, yearns for all the wonder and promise of the New Testament vision of church to come true. After struggling with Scripture in live-together church communities, he shares the Scriptural practices and wisdom that make for an authentic, sustainable, and joyful life together. For any person or church wanting to move beyond the cliche of community to the radical vision of the New Testament, this book is an invaluable guide

part one

The Nature and Purpose of Churches (What’s the Problem Here?)

one

Growing into the Stature of Christ
(Whatever Happened to the Kingdom of God?)

Paul says that Christians will grow into “the full stature of Christ” (Eph 4:13).1 He doesn’t seem to mean sometime in the distant future or way off in heaven. He seems to mean here and now. Which is an astonishing thought. It seems almost heretical, but the text says exactly that. It teaches that Christians will normally become saints.

In the New Testament, “Christian” wasn’t yet a common word. So do you remember how the New Testament writers most often refer to Christians? As saints. For example, “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi . . .” (Phil 1:1). Fifty-nine times the New Testament calls us saints. Fifty-nine times. The word isn’t just for Mother Theresa or St. Francis. It’s for all of us. And it means “people who are holy.”

Of course, it could just be a change in how we use words. Once the people of God were called “saints,” but it was a proper name whose meaning was largely forgotten, as is the meaning of most proper names. (Take Smith for example.) But now we use “saint” literally so it refers only to extraordinarily virtuous people. But I doubt that that’s what’s happening. No, the New Testament is full of extravagant promises and extraordinary expectations. It really does promise that we will become holy. It expects it. It expects ordinary Christians to ordinarily become saints.

That’s the normal Christian life.

For example, the night Jesus was betrayed, he prayed to his Father that those who believed in him “may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” (John 17:22–23). That is, Jesus prayed that we would be as united as the Trinity—united with him and therefore with each other. Once again, his words don’t seem to refer only to a distant future off in heaven. He seems to include the here and now.

As I said before, this is so astonishing it’s almost heretical. And it’s similar to Paul’s talk of growing into the stature of Christ. If we’re in unity with each other and God, then haven’t we in fact matured in holiness to something like the stature of Christ?

Or try this statement of Paul’s: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:19b–20a). Here Paul isn’t praying that something will happen or promising that it might in some future conditional subjunctive. He is asserting that it is in fact true of himself at that moment. He says flat that he has been killed and Christ is living his life. So since Christ is living in him, he has presumably grown into something like the stature of Christ.

Then there’s, “You are the light of the world” (Matt 5:14a).2 Which wouldn’t be a surprising thing to say about Jesus, since it’s referring back to the suffering servant (Isa 49:6). But this is Jesus talking to his followers:3 we are the light of the world. Paul and Barnabas make the point even more clearly by saying, “For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth’” (Acts 13:47). Apparently the people of God as a whole are to be transformed into light to bring salvation to the world. We are somehow a stand-in for Jesus, the suffering servant. Or to be more precise, we are his body in some sense that’s not merely metaphorical. As such, we grow into his stature.

Then in Ephesians, Paul says not that we are the light of the world but that “by the church” even “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” will come to know God’s “mystery hidden for ages” (3:10, 9). Clearly, the New Testament expects the people of God to be extravagantly transformed—or at least to have some power we don’t think of ourselves as having.

The Sermon on the Mount also points toward our becoming saints. What it’s full of isn’t extravagant promises but extravagant commands: commands we can’t possibly do. It tells us to turn the other cheek, not to look on a woman to lust after her, not to worry about where you’re going to get your next meal (this to a crowd that included poor people who genuinely didn’t know how they would feed themselves tomorrow), and on and on. The extravagance of the commands is so extreme that books have been written on why Jesus would give such commands when we can’t possibly live up to them. Some people think their purpose is to drive us to despair so that we will throw ourselves on God, and others think they exist as ideals to point us in the right direction even if we never get anywhere near the destination.

But as worthwhile as those perspectives may be, it’s hard to find them within the Sermon on the Mount itself. That is, it’s hard to believe that Jesus or Matthew primarily meant us to read the Sermon on the Mount either of those ways. After all, the Sermon on the Mount ends with a warning to those who don’t pursue its commands: “And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” (Matt 7:26–27). Matthew, not to mention Jesus, seems to think that these commands are for us, that we can make a meaningful effort to obey them, and that we darn well better.

And to get the larger perspective, don’t forget that Jesus came announcing the kingdom of God. It was at hand, he said. And the writers of the New Testament clearly thought that the kingdom had come substantially with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. At that point, God gave his people new hearts with his law written on them. That fulfilled the promise of a new covenant in which God assures us, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:33).4

According to Jesus, according to Paul, according to John, according to Matthew, according to the whole New Testament, the normal Christian life is for us to become saints.

Ordinary Christians ordinarily grow into something like the stature of Christ.

So what’s going on here?

Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that the New Testament is right. It’s not at all clear that most of us are saints or even that we’re on the way. In fact, it’s pretty clear that we’re not. People like Mother Theresa are pretty rare, and I’m not referring to the power of her personality. I’m referring to her holiness. The fact is that few of us even approach holiness. And our churches are often about as unified as the Democratic Party right after losing an election. Which is a long way from growing into the stature of Christ.

The New Testament promises so much. What can it be up to? What can Jesus and Matthew and John and Paul have meant? How can their teaching be so disconnected from our reality? Is the gap between their promise and our reality an unbridgeable chasm?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not so much disturbed by the poor performance of us Christians as about whether we know what we’re up to. Fans of the Chicago Cubs don’t seem to mind too much that their team plays badly and drops the ball from time to time. But what if in the middle of a close game, the Cubs sat down in the infield and started playing tiddlywinks? Or eating lunch?

No doubt, the illustration will prompt all kinds of supposedly entertaining remarks about the Cubs, but when the people of God forget what they’re about, it’s not entertaining. Dropping the ball is one thing. We all do that. I certainly do. And the most casual reading of 1 Corinthians or of Revelation 2–3 prepares us for churches that drop the ball. Often and badly, even. But I’m not sure it prepares us for churches playing the wrong game. Playing the wrong game is very odd and very troubling.

In fact, it’s the most troubling thing I know—this gap between today’s churches and the New Testament. But what’s troubling isn’t that churches fail. That’s very New Testament. The kingdom is not yet here in its fullness. So I don’t expect Christians to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Or to catch every fly ball. Or to die rather than let Jews be taken to concentration camps. That sort of thing is great when it happens, but the New Testament gives us little reason to expect heroics of ourselves or of other Christians. Peter seems to have failed with some regularity. Besides, I’m a pastor myself and have learned not to be too stunned by the sin and failure of the folks I pastor. After all, my own record isn’t that great. It’s God’s grace that is great.

So, for example, I don’t expect us to live up to the Sermon on the Mount. But I do expect us to fail in such a way that people watching us will know what we’re reaching for, what we’re failing at. By now I don’t expect us to be as united with each other as Jesus is with the Father, but I do expect us to live in such a way that outsiders will be able to tell that being united with each other is what we intend to be about.

I may be undercutting my own argument, but my problem isn’t that we fail. Nor that we do church badly. It’s that we’re doing something else. We seem to be playing the wrong game against the wrong team at the wrong time. Not always, but pretty often. Maybe especially on Sunday mornings.

Depravity

The Bible is full of extravagant promises and extraordinary expectations, but it’s also full of accounts of extraordinary human sin and extravagant failure. The Bible is as aware of the chasm between promise and practice as I am, as is the most critical among us. Both the Old and New Testaments are unwaveringly honest about the disturbing state of humanity, including the people of God.

So how do you pull together the Bible’s abundant promises with its unflinching report of sin and misery? It would be impossible to take the Bible seriously if it were full of promises but had no sense of the holocausts that humanity seems to choose. At least we can be thankful that, unlike some people today, the Bible isn’t naive.

Some years ago, I noticed something I thought odd: the parts of the Bible that make the wild promises are fully in touch with the width and depth of sin. It’s not that the promises are in one part of the Bible and the misery in another. For example, the Psalms are full of glowing promises about green pastures and the Lord being our shepherd, our rock, our refuge, our shield, our salvation, and on and on. Then the very next Psalm and sometimes the same one will say, in effect, “God, if you’re so great, where are you? Why do I feel so alone while my enemies overrun me?”

Take Psalm 79 (chosen almost at random):

O God, the nations [the heathen, not the chosen people] have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the air for food, the flesh of your faithful to the wild animals of the earth. . . . How long, O LORD? Will you be angry forever? . . . Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power preserve those doomed to die. (Ps 79:1–2, 5a, 11)

Here the Psalmist believes in God’s great power. The power of the heathen is just an expression of God’s power. But God isn’t acting yet; so he wants to know how long he has to put up with the mess.

The same sort of thing is true of Paul and John. Both have a dual sense: God’s promise and humanity’s sin.

Perhaps there’s a clue here in the way biblical writers hold the agony and the ecstasy together. For example, the Bible practically starts with Adam and Eve’s rebellion. But, even before that, the Bible offers great promise: God creates a wonderful universe, declares it good, then declares it very good, blesses it, and, finally places Adam and Eve in the best part of it, the Garden of Eden. This framework of promise is the frame for the whole rest of the biblical story; everything else that happens in human history happens within the context of the universe being God’s good creation, blessed by him.

Now of course, as I’ve already said, almost immediately Adam and Eve choose to rebel (Gen 3), and the promise is thrashed. In their willful...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Part 1: The Nature and Purpose of Churches (What’s the Problem Here?)
• Part 2: Things that Make It Hard for Modern Christians to Do Church Well (Reflections on Getting Culturally Absorbed)
• Part 3: Reflections on Doing Church in America (Church Structures)
• Part 4: Foundational Christian Truths and Life Together (Theological Practicalities)
• Part 5: Love and Reconciliation (Reclaiming Church, Revisioning Church)
• Bibliography