What on Earth is the Church?

An Inquirer's Guide

Henderson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498238861
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The author's focus and intention for this book was provoked by several stimuli. One is that more than 50 percent of the world's population is under twenty-five years of age, and for the most part not formed by the church. Secondly, in the coffee shop where he hangs out, when his conversation partners learn of his long career as a pastor, they inevitably ask about the church: "What in the world is the church? What is its purpose?" And thirdly, it is provoked by the lament of a very gifted journalist and editor who rejected his strict Christian upbringing and has been in his adult years an avowed agnostic--but who recently, while visiting a monastery in Spain and hearing the monks chant their evening prayers, sensed a longing for what he had forsaken. These three stimuli have inspired this attempt at an alternative narrative to the essence of the church, an attempt to give a definition to an inquirer from square one. This book may not resonate with those who are content with religious Christianity and its familiar institutions. Its timely message is this: the church has got to be a thrilling and purposeful dimension of the good news of Jesus Christ.

1

What on Earth is the Church?

So I keep running across those young friends of mine who in our casual conversations ask me this very question: “What on earth is the church?” So that’s the question before us.

What I will attempt will be to seek something of an adequate answer to that question, now asked more and more frequently by my younger conversation partners . . . those who are not the products of Christendom1 culture. I love their questions. They are insistent questions asked in all honest curiosity and innocence, and they deserve some kind of helpful response.

One really needs a robust sense of humor, however, in engaging such an endeavor since the church is always an “in process” community, and often full of apparent contradictions. It is never perfect. It is made up of such diverse, and often unlikely, encouraging and discouraging pieces, sometimes wonderfully expressive of Christ’s teachings. It is also made up all kinds of persons, sometimes fractured, sometimes eccentric . . . but also of many remarkable folk whose lives are beautiful living demonstrations of the new life found in Jesus Christ . . . and they come from every ethnic entity. The church’s history contains so many mixed signals, which is why I purpose in these pages to help inquirers know what the church is and also what it is not.

To all of that let me add an introductory caveat here: The church, as it is set forth in the New Testament narrative, is ultimately not a humanly explainable entity. The church is created by the supernatural working of God’s Spirit, or (if you can handle it), by the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, and is now at work in ordinary human beings—for which working there is no category in the minds of most. Such a category doesn’t even register on the scope of human rationality. To say that the church is both complex and ambiguous is something of an understatement—but the more one studies the history of the Christian church, the more one is inescapably forced to such a conclusion.

Then again, our answers will not come without sorting through and discerning all kinds of obfuscating and often confusing stimuli and misinterpretations along the way. So let me begin.

An Interesting Encounter Is a Good Place to Begin

I was having supper recently at a favorite village restaurant when I encountered a fascinating younger guy who is a gifted journalist by profession. He related how he had experienced a very moving moment recently when he and his wife, as tourists, had visited a famous monastery in Spain to observe evening prayers by the monks. His apparent lament was that (as he put it) he had long since abandoned the dogmatic Christian faith of his youth, and had accepted an agnostic view in the intervening years . . . but somehow listening to those monks chant the liturgy that evening stirred up within him something of a longing for a more fulfilling spirituality than was met by his own agnostic and intellectual explanation for anything transcendent. That encounter and discussion were very revealing to me of what is true for so many.

Driving home after my supper and that encounter, out of the archives of my memory came the words of a plaintive old negro spiritual: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child a long way from home” . . . with its haunting sense of some incompleteness in one’s life, something absent, something that is not as it should be. Something of that experience is what motivates me as I attempt to relate what I see to be the purpose of the church as it is intended to be in the design of God, and how, if it is true to its calling, it also speaks to the longings of all of the motherless children out there—all those seeking and curious inquirers who have that aching void in their subconsciousness, which all of the distractions of their social media culture cannot fill. This inquirer’s guide is for those motherless ones, both those who are incredibly gifted and those who are fractured, hopeless, and confused—who have so much potential, but are also so lonely of heart. I long for them.

Why is there, deep within the human psyche, that quest for meaning . . . for some center to one’s life, some authority, some creative source, some guiding line, some hope or final goal beyond itself? Why is there that quest after some fulfilling spirituality, that longing for true and caring relationships in our human journey? And why is there so much crap, so much brokenness, so much indifference to others, and such inhumanity expressed everywhere? Where do all of those questions and longings come from? What do I do with them? When all is quiet, is there some deep sense that I am really like a motherless child?

All one has to do is to read back over human history to realize that such thoughts and emotions are not at all new. Some have engaged in denial, and accepted their own self-determination that they are on their own to make the best of it, and not try to look for (what they contemptuously call) some cowardly and escapist God-prop out there somewhere.2 Maybe Eastern mysticism? Or Zen Buddhism? Maybe New Ageism? Then there are those who engage in priding themselves in creating their own “designer gods,” i.e., gods after their own making, in order to justify their “spirituality.”

There are also the many who deliberately attempt to bury such questions lest the answers themselves might open possibilities with which they are trying to escape, and with which they don’t want to deal. One can be ever so successful, so connected socially, and with such access through the Internet, with so much more information than any previous generation, so continually entertained . . . and still there comes out of nowhere those sobering moments when those haunting questions arise: “What is my life all about? Is there anything beyond this life? How would I know?” There are those who assume that joining some religious organization (like a church) will at least put them on good terms with whatever divine being there might be out there, and so they “cover their bases” with that affiliation.3

Atheism is also a “faith position” that simply refuses to accept that there is any God-being out there—period and paragraph—and is continually coming up with attempted answers to ultimate questions. Agnosticism may be a convenient escape, but it is not ultimately a satisfying answer. One of course can simply accept that we live in a context of chaos, without any metaphysical being who might be an ultimate source. We may reflect that this world is pretty screwed up, but then all of us are swimming around in some boundless, bottomless sea of chance . . . so “What the hell! Make the best of it!”

All of those are actually “faith positions.” They are the assumptions upon which we build our lives. All of that points us back to the original question: What on earth is the church? Suppose that I were willing to acknowledge the possibility that I might be one of those motherless children and that I were looking for answers. Where in the world would I look? What in the world would I be looking for? How would I recognize it?

Such questions take us to the next surprising passage of our inquiry here.

1. Christendom can be defined as the period of history that began about the time that the Roman emperor Constantine made his newly found Christian faith the official religion of the Roman Empire. In a sense he co-opted the faith to make it useful for his purposes. He gave it all kinds of privileges and endowments, so that it would be comparable to the pagan religions that had been dominant—such as temples, a priesthood, rites, and political privilege. In essence, the church and the empire were on the same page, or became identified with each other. That comes down to us today with the “God bless America” response of officials, or the church’s tax-exempt status. In Christendom the empire said to the church, “You pray for and support us, and we’ll take care of you.” There are a whole lot of inner contradictions and embarrassing episodes resulting from that Christendom concept, but the Christendom era is now rapidly fading, and our own culture is in transition into a post-Christendom reality, which is new territory for the church. That is presuppositional, and I will be coming back to it.

2. A good record of this is the autobiography of C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. Lewis was, unquestionably, one of the giant Christian voices and intellects of the twentieth century, yet he was a renowned agnostic in his early career, and a faculty member at Oxford University. He is poignant in his description of how God finally captured his mind and heart. Lewis is currently known more for his children’s stories, The Chronicles of Narnia, but was prolific in his writings concerning the very quest that I am addressing here.

3. Alas, sadly, the church itself is inhabited by all too many poor lost souls, who become insufferably religious in their attempt to please whatever God there may be out there. The biblical narrative describes such as “having the appearance of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim 3:5).

2

Where You Would Probably Not Look

Unless a person were in some kind of desperation mode in seeking to find out where to look for the answers to those questions we just visited, and especially if one had a streak of skepticism or cynicism in himself or herself—and were resolved that we are all lost in the cosmos—one would probably not look at an eccentric peasant figure from a small city in a remote nation in the Near East who appeared quietly on the scene in the first century, making such utterly outrageous statements about who he ultimately was and why he had come onto the scene. Yet, that obscure beginning and unlikely figure is full or surprises.

Look again. Take a long hard look. Look again at the questions for which we are seeking answers, and then tune in to what that peasant was teaching and to why he was taken so seriously by those who encountered him, and why they were so constrained by what he was saying . . . as to become curious and begin to find him compelling, authentic, and utterly other than any of the ostensible religious leaders they had become accustomed to ignoring. Then take a long hard look at the awesome global impact that such an unlikely person has had over the ensuing two millennia of human history, and ask yourself: “Am I missing something here?”

Take note: When the Creator God wanted to communicate his unimaginably great and ineffable love for his rebellious creation, his motherless children (persons such as you and I), he did not send a disembodied sermon, or a philosophical treatise, or some mystical experience . . . but what he did was literally come himself right into our human history. He came in the flesh-and-blood person of his Son, the one called Jesus. Yes, and this God-made-flesh-and-blood is this same eccentric peasant figure in that remote nation. Yes, but keep going: God’s communication in flesh and ...