Ten Great Ideas from First Corinthians

A Leader's Guide to Renewing Your Church

George Renner, Mark Shaw

• Éditeur: Wipf and Stock
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725286856
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Christian Church

First Corinthians is one of the most relevant NT documents for both younger churches seeking maturity in the majority world and older churches seeking renewal in the Western world in the twenty-first century. The reason this epistle is so relevant is that it focuses on renewing the church through believing and living out the good news that because of Jesus's death and resurrection God has begun his new creation agenda amid the broken world of today. This is not just another commentary (there are many very good ones) but rather we present a biblical theology of church renewal, based on solid exegesis, and our experience as teachers and pastors in both Africa and North America. This book will pull out the essential teaching of Paul on renewal in ten manageable principles, or "great ideas." Church renewal is not just following certain steps but results from nurturing a culture that practices both cross power and a life of new creation hope. When churches make the shift from traditionalism to radical community and evangelical activism through a new experience of the gospel seen as both personal liberation and the transformation of all things, the church begins to move, and the world begins to change.

Chapter 1

The Church

Monument or Movement?

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”1

—C. S. Lewis

In 2000, Simon Jenkins, former editor of the Times of London, published his book, England’s Thousand Best Churches. Reviewers loved it. Readers loved it too. It sold well, and in 2002, Jenkins published a revised edition. The casual reader of Jenkins’s book may have been surprised, however, by what was not included in his highly regarded study of England’s churches. One finds, for example, nothing about church leadership, mission, and theology. There is no mention of healthy congregational life. He gives no advice on church growth, emerging churches, the missional church, or how to reach millennials. Jenkins’s book avoided each of these topics because his book was not about people at all—tt was about architecture. Gothic arches, not growing congregations, was his chosen topic. For Jenkins and his audience of travelers looking for new tourist destinations, the emptier the church, the better. Judged by the title alone, England’s best churches are the ones that are dead.

Some may find it unusual that writers and readers in the West would so readily identify the church of Jesus Christ as a building with stained glass, slate roofs, and rood screens. Old habits die hard. For a thousand years, churches of place (where I have to go) dotted the landscape of Christian Europe. They were visible reminders of a fantastic political experiment composed of a rough alliance between popes and emperors. The experiment was called Christendom, or the Holy Roman Empire, or even the kingdom of God on earth. Like a brooding T-Rex, this mighty creature dominated its environment for a millennium. Even in Napoleon’s day Christendom still had enough kick in it for “the Little Corporal” to let the pope crown him Holy Roman Emperor. That day is gone. In post-Christian Europe, at least in the eyes of some, all that is left of the church is an ecclesiastical Jurassic Park dotted with the bones of its now-extinct dinosaurs. Hence Simon Jenkins’s book.

God is Back

But something new is happening in the world. The ancient amber of early Christianity and its vitally preserved DNA has been discovered once again, producing new kinds of movements, ones that will never find their way into any of Jenkins’s guidebooks. All over the world, churches of choice (where I want to go), rather than churches of place, are flooding new landscapes, new languages, and new lives.

In 2010, another respected British editor, John Micklethwaite, formerly of The Economist, wrote a vastly different guidebook to the same British public addressed by Jenkins. Like Jenkins’s book it was about the church, but this time the church was not seen as a building but rather as a movement. This was the church of the living people variety, exploding in new movements, structures, mission, and worship by the hundreds of millions all over the world. Written with Micklethwaite’s co-author, Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World added their evidence to a large and growing literature documenting the new resurgence of Christianity as a global movement.2

Putting these two books side by side is not a bad way to capture the paradoxical trends of twenty-first-century religious life. The church is growing in the so-called Global South while dying in the Global North. As missiologist and historian Andrew Walls frames the phenomenon: we are witnessing a world made up of a post-Christian West and a post-Western Christianity. If you are a pastor or an interested layperson in a Western congregation or even a non-Western one, you may have heard this paradox frequently in the last ten years. “I don’t need another book describing the paradox,” I hear you saying. “I need a book that helps me do something about it.”

This book is more than just a reflection of the contradictions of Christianity in the modern world. It seeks to move beyond Jenkins’s architectural definition (the church as monument to the past) and more towards Micklethwaite’s (the church as a movement changing the world). It addresses both the post-Christian West, as well as the post-Western Christian Global South, and makes what might be an obvious but outrageous suggestion: the church around the world is coming back to life and your church can be part of this new phenomenon. In brief, I believe that what God is doing in the church around the world, he can do in the church around the corner.

How can this happen? How can that stately white congregational church that graced Main Street in the little New England town catch fire once again? How can that Texas Methodist chapel, the First Baptist Church of Anywhere, the Mosaic church downtown, or the Deliverance Church in many African cities, roll back time and become the kind of movements that once shaped their nations? Can those historic churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that feel left behind by the renewal around them come alive once again? I believe they can. Acts may seem the obvious choice of sourcebook for this kind of renewal, but perhaps the most useful biblical guidebook to the revitalization of the Christian church today is Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. To turn one’s church into a movement requires recovering this ancient roadmap found in the New Testament and seeing its relevance in our world today.

So what makes a church come alive again? Whatever answer we give to this question must begin with the admission that church revitalization is a work of God and not something that results from sociology or the latest marketing gimmicks. Why not yours? What do they know that the rest of us need to know? How does one turn the church into a movement?

How do you Raise the Dead?

There is a large and growing literature on revival and revitalization. Some of it is concerned with biblical foundations of these critical questions. However, what is often missing is what the Bible says about the renewal of specific local congregations. Acts looks at the expansion of the Christian movement across the Roman empire but doesn’t focus on a single church. Paul’s Pastoral Epistles do a great job of showing how to order a local congregation, but do not specifically deal with helping a local church get unstuck. Romans is not a manual of local church renewal but written to the Church of Rome for missionary reasons, to validate Paul’s missionary message of the gospel to the gentiles. Many of the other Epistles are written to groups of churches or to local churches of which we know little. The grand exceptions in the New Testament are Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth. He writes very specifically about the practical problems in Corinth, a local church that, while young in its faith, seemed to be stuck trying to navigate its way through a very aggressive pagan culture.

This book is about connecting what Paul has to say regarding the renewal of the local congregation in Corinth to the local church today. The conviction we bring to this study is that Paul presents a timeless roadmap to help a church lost in the present find its way into the future. Let me say a few things about the church in Corinth and then give an overview of what the rest of the book will look like.

Why First Corinthians?

Most of what we know about the founding of the church comes from Acts 18. Paul arrived in Corinth from Athens (probably walking the entire fifty-mile journey). After arriving, he met and stayed with Aquila and Priscilla, fellow tentmakers and Jews who had recently relocated to Corinth from Rome, from which they, along with much of the rest of the Jewish population, had been expelled by the emperor Claudius. They eagerly embraced Paul’s message and listened in rapt attention as he preached to groups of Jews and gentiles around the city. His message produced both friends and enemies. Paul was taken to court by angry Jewish leaders. Gallio was the brother of the famous stoic philosopher Seneca, mentor to the young emperor-in-waiting, Nero. His two-year appointment as proconsul or governor of the province of Achaea from AD 51–52 helps fix the date of Paul’s Corinthian mission. Gallio dismissed all charges and issued the crucial judgment that the new Christian movement enjoyed the relig...