Dynamics of Spiritual Life

An Evangelical Theology of Renewal

Richard F. Lovelace

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830852888
• eBook ISBN: 9780830854936
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this classic work of spiritual theology, historian Richard Lovelace presents a history of spiritual renewals in light of biblical models. Drawing from the best of different Protestant traditions, Dynamics of Spiritual Life lays out a comprehensive approach to the renewal of the church.

In the first half of the book, Lovelace surveys awakening movements since the Reformation, particularly emphasizing Jonathan Edwards's theology of renewal. He then goes deeper into specific elements of such movements and their significance for both doctrinal reformation and spiritual renewal.

Lovelace examines such practical issues as renewal of the local congregation, ways revivals go wrong, prospects for closing the "sanctification gap," the historical role of evangelical movements in promoting both unity and division, and Christian approaches to the arts. With scholarly and pastoral insight, he offers a powerful vision of renewal that can unify various models across traditions, combining individual and corporate spirituality, social activism, and evangelism.

For over forty years, this well-loved book has helped Christians understand the spiritual movement they are a part of and guided leaders in planting and pastoring churches. This expanded edition features a new forewordby Timothy Keller.

RENEWAL
IN THE
CHURCH

PART
II

The Renewal
of the
Local
Congregation

6

AMERICAN HOME MISSION TO YOUNG people in the early 1970s achieved a measure of disenculturation, and the result was a remarkable openness to the gospel among counterculture dropouts and straight college students on the secular campuses. Whether or not the wave of response to the Christian message in these circles marked the beginning of another Great Awakening, it is certain that a flood of new leadership has entered the body of Christ. Communes, house churches and campus gatherings have been filled with converts dedicated and hungry for instruction.

But whether or not this awakening will have a lasting positive effect on the church remains a question, as we have already observed. Ministers may be aware of the new things that have happened, but their congregations tend to slumber peacefully on, and even when they are partially awake, they are nervous. The generation gap and the culture gap are often sufficiently great between these young people and their elders that they form a firebreak to prevent the spread of the revival. In a recent mission at a large Eastern university, I found the college Christians linking forces with a converted Hell’s Angel to minister to the drug culture on campus and among the street people in a nearby city. But the local pastor who was trying to bring both of these forces to bear on his congregation (which consisted of about twenty-five persons, with at least five desperate pastoral problems among them) was totally frustrated. His people actually seemed to resent the vitality of the college young people, as well as their mildly different cultural style.

And yet the continuing health of the young people, as well as the revitalization of the Middle-American church, is dependent on the establishment of a liaison between older and younger Christians. The young converts are new blood intended to quicken the body of older Christians, and the latter, despite their partial enculturation, have much to offer in stability and tradition which can prevent the youth culture from going cultic and insular. If new waves of converts do not receive sound instruction in the theology of the Christian life, in ten years they will be just as dormant and derailed as their elders. It is therefore vital that the revival spread across the cultural firebreak into the heartland of the American church, the local congregation.

In order to see how this goal can be reached, we should first review the condition of enculturation prevailing in many congregations. Assuming pastors themselves have become aware of the degree of their own unconscious enculturation, what do they face in their own parishes?

In most cases what they confront is a style of living very unlike the spiritually vibrant mission station described at the end of Acts 2. The “ultimate concern” of most church members is not the worship and service of Christ in evangelistic mission and social compassion, but rather survival and success in their secular vocation. The church is a spoke on the wheel of life connected to the secular hub. It is a departmental subconcern, not the organizing center of all other concerns. Churchmembers who have been conditioned all their lives to devote themselves to building their own kingdom and whose flesh naturally gravitates in that direction anyway find it hard to invest much energy in the kingdom of God. They go to church once or twice a week and punch the clock, so to speak, fulfilling their “church obligation” by sitting passively and listening critically or approvingly to the pastor’s teaching.

Sometimes with great effort they can be maneuvered into some active role in the church’s program, like a trained seal in a circus act, but their hearts are not fully in it. They may repeat the catchwords of the theology of grace, but many have little deep awareness that they and other Christians are “accepted in the beloved.” Since their understanding of justification is marginal or unreal—anchored not to Christ, but to some conversion experience in the past or to an imagined present state of goodness in their lives—they know little of the dynamic of justification. Their understanding of sin focuses upon behavioral externals which they can eliminate from their lives by a little will power and ignores the great submerged continents of pride, covetousness and hostility beneath the surface. Thus their pharisaism defends them both against full involvement in the church’s mission and against full subjection of their inner lives to the authority of Christ.

Their religious lives, however, do not satisfy their consciences at the deepest level, and so there is a powerful underlying insecurity in their lives. Consciously they defend themselves as dedicated Christians who are as good as anybody else, but underneath the conscious level there is deep despair and self-rejection. Above the surface this often manifests itself in a compulsive floating hostility which focuses upon others in critical judgment. Thus a congregation of Christians who are insecure in their relationship to Christ can be a thorn bush of criticism, rejection, estrangement and party spirit. Unsure in the depth of their hearts what God thinks of them, churchmembers will fanatically affirm their own gifts and take fierce offense when anyone slights them, or else they will fuss endlessly with a self-centered inventory of their own inferiority in an inverted pride.

They will also become entrenched in their own enculturation and set up mortars with which to shell those in other cultural molds. Alienation from other races, political persuasions and the kids with their long hair will be badges of honor for them. They will take good principles and sound doctrine and affirm them in a way which attacks and hurts others unnecessarily. Confronted with a change in the church’s program, their response will be a frantic clinging to past precedents: “But we always did it this way.” Their church life is a desperate effort to maintain allegiance to a Leviticus written forty years ago. Their ability to follow Christ into constructive change is severely limited by their bondage to cultural supports for their insecurity. I suspect that this portrait applies equally to Evangelical and non-Evangelical churchmembers. In the case of the former, it is no wonder that their word for the Evangelical faith is “conservatism.”

Pastors will often find that those who have risen into leadership (or thrust themselves into it) within the congregation are persons in this state of insecurity and bondage. Lay leadership is frequently so bound by cultural defense mechanisms and prerational conditioning that it is unable to “contend earnestly for the faith” in the liberty of the Holy Spirit. Hence even those who aim at good goals and try to follow the Spirit in their behavior end up handling situations in the flesh because of their domination by unconscious compulsions. A typical example of this in current church life is the lay leader in a church judiciary who, confronted by ministers promoting the ordination of homosexuals, publicly explodes like a tin drill bit hitting steel, throwing fragments in all directions.

Confronted with this kind of violent reaction when they seek to mold their congregations into instruments of evangelism and social healing, pastors gradually settle down and lose interest in being change agents in the church. An unconscious conspiracy arises between their flesh and that of their congregations. It becomes tacitly understood that the laity will give pastors places of special honor in the exercise of their gifts, if the pastors will agree to leave their congregations’ pre-Christian lifestyles undisturbed and do not call for the mobilization of lay gifts for the work of the kingdom. Pastors are permitted to become ministerial superstars. Their pride is fed and their insecurity is pacified even if they are run ragged, and their congregations are permitted to remain herds of sheep in which each has cheerfully turned to his own way.

The dissatisfaction of the rising leadership among youth with the traditional form of the institutional church may well be simply a refusal to enter situations which will inevitably stamp them into this kind of mold. Many of them would much rather enter communes of younger Christians who are uniformly oriented toward mission instead of pursuing it haphazardly as a sideline while devoting most of their energies to the rat race for success. Since the finest leaders among our children are determined not to play in this kind of game, the churches are going to have to change if they want to retain this leadership.

But there are many other pressures toward change. Chief among them is the radical cultural pluralism which, as the futurologists have told us, is emerging as the twentieth century moves onward. So many subcultures are proliferating that Christian lay people almost need, disenculturation to preserve their sanity. As Alvin Toffler says, the future is arriving early in countless new and disconcerting forms.1 In order to cope with this catastrophically shifting environment, the Christian needs to be very deeply rooted in the cross of Christ.

Some critics of the institutional church question whether it is possible for it to achieve disenculturation and would insist on new bottles to hold the new wine. Others who are pastors may theoretically be convinced that the transformation is possible but may feel that the inertia and hostility to change present in the average congregation make the job so difficult as to be hardly worth the cost.

But would starting over with new congregations in new shapes of mission avoid the problem of enculturation? It is a practical certainty that every new gathering of Christians will recapitulate the crisis of disenculturation experienced by the early church as recorded in Acts. Unless new converts are persuaded to stop leaning on their culture and the law and to lean fully on Jesus Christ in every phase of their lifestyle, their spiritual lives and the mission of the church will inevitably be short-circuited by the process of enculturation. As for the old converts who are unconsciously trapped in hardened shells of protective enculturation, it would be disloyalty to them (and to Christ’s mission through them) to allow them to continue to exist without the full deliverance available in Christ.

The shape of the Christian movement as a constellation of local congregations needs to be renewed and continued, not scrapped and superseded, for both theological and practical reasons. While the New Testament nowhere presents a Levitical set of commands for congregational worship and church government, it obviously takes over and adapts the synagogue structure as a framework for local fellowship and nurture. This is fitting, since the synagogue was the local meeting place for Jews who were too distant to attend the Temple where the sacrifices were held, just as we are currently at a distance from the heavenly sanctuary where the Lamb of God is physically present. The apostles were aware of the need for new wineskins, but they sought for these in the process of disenculturation, not in any radical reshuffling of polity.

There is a principle of the conservation of structures in the precedent they set, and there are many practical reasons why this principle needs to be followed today. Lines of communication along which renewal can travel can easily be dismantled in any wholesale creation of new structures. A dissolving of local congregations into house churches, independent communes or elite task forces would not only disrupt communication, it might create structures which do not by themselves have the power to carry the whole people of God forward through history with the same effectiveness as parish churches. The local congregation is like a whaling vessel. It is too large and unwieldy in itself to catch whales, so it must carry smaller vessels aboard for this purpose. But the smaller whaleboats are ill-advised to strike out on their own apart from the mother ship. They can catch a few whales but they cannot process them, and the smaller boats can easily be destroyed by storms.

Nevertheless, if the local congregation is not to be abandoned and by-passed in the renewal of the church, it must be itself renewed and disenculturated. How can this be done? I am reluctant to speak on this issue. For one thing, it is presumptuous to do so. No single individual has the pastoral expertise necessary to qualify for this task. And the strategy of renewing congregations must differ from case to case so that generalizations may be misleading. The wide differences in “parish ethos” among Catholics and the different sorts of Protestants complicate the matter. It might be better simply to call for an application of the biblical truths behind the primary and secondary elements of renewal tailored carefully to each local situation. But perhaps some general guidelines which will apply to all congregations may be distilled out of what has been said already. Although most Evangelical approaches to revival have dealt primarily with individual regeneration or awakening, this account will try to deal with two tasks which are interrelated and mutually reinforcing but nevertheless distinguishable: the renewal of individuals and the renewal of the church’s corporate structure.

Individual Renewal

The beginning place for personal renewal in most congregations is a preaching and teaching ministry which emphasizes primary elements of spiritual dynamics: depth proclamation of the gospel. The aim of the minister should be to encourage in every parishioner an intelligent response of faith laying claim to the provisions of Christ’s redemptive work, a daily standing on the four platforms discussed in chapter four: You are accepted, you are delivered, you are not alone, you have authority. At the same time that this good news is given, the “bad news” to which it is the answer must be presented: the depth and gravity of sin in the light of God’s holiness and righteousness, and the problems likely to be encountered in spiritual conflict with the powers of darkness. The balance and proportion of these positive and negative materials of preaching, and the order in which they are approached, is a subtle matter which depends on the spiritual profile of each congregation.

Preaching and Teaching for Individual Renewal. Churches which have been fed on a heavy diet of “legal terrors” or moralism will need to be addressed with a strong positive emphasis on the grace of God, in line with the Lutheran tradition, before they are led into any deeper examination of the darker or more awesome background of the gospel which gives it meaning. Churches which have been raised on cheap grace (and this may include most congregations today, Evangelical and non-Evangelical) might be handled with the typical Puritan approach, the presentation of the majesty of God and a searching “law-work” leading to conviction of sin which will awaken a hunger for the gospel and a full appreciation of the saving work of Christ. But this could create a serious credibility gap between the preacher and his or her audience, since such preaching is widely thought to be extinct except in backwoods revivalism. Probably the Lutheran Formula of Concord is correct when it recommends that a full explanation of grace precede the preaching of the law in order to establish enough confidence in the congregation so that it can be led fully into the light.

While Evangelical churches have been preaching incessantly on the love of God since the Moody era, in far too many instances the justifying work of Christ has not been spelled out clearly and balanced by an equal stress on sanctification, so that the grace of God can be both intelligible and credible for the individual believer. Many of our people are severely enculturated because their relationship to Christ is so insecure that they are not free to cut loose from cultural support. So we must first make real to them the grace of God in accepting them daily, not because of their spirituality or their achievements in Christian service, but because God has accounted to them the perfect righteousness of Christ.

This may seem to be the most elemental concept in the Protestant tradition but is just as rare an act of faith among Protestants as among Catholics. We all automatically gravitate toward the assumption that we are justified by our level of sanctification, and when this posture is adopted it inevitably focuses our attention not on Christ but on the adequacy of our own obedience. We start each day wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Timothy Keller
• Preface
• Part I - Dynamics of Renewal
• Part II - Renewal in the Church
• Notes
• Index
• Praise for Dynamics of Spiritual Life
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright