Earlier this week, I wrote about the need for an ontological understanding of the church, one that views the church for what it is, not for what it does. I mentioned a number of problems that arise from a functional understanding of the church. But there is an additional problem worth noting. When we attempt to define or measure the church functionally, we try our best to disguise the fact that all the people in the church are still sinners.
Naturally, we don't altogether mask this – you can't escape something as blatant as Romans 3:23 – but we make a concerted effort to downplay reality. What is that reality? It is simply that the church is a mess. We don't like the fact that nobody has it all together. We don't like it when we get hurt in church because church is supposed to be a place where everything is good and peaceful. We don't like the fact that living the Christian life is really, really difficult and so we (sometimes unconsciously) draw up a set of standards for what we think Christians should be like that make a lot of concessions to our culture because then it is easier to make it look like we have it all together, and as a bonus, outsiders will feel more welcome when they are among us. We want to justify the idea that 'Jesus makes everything better,' and we need to create that illusion in order to make it believable.
Needless to say, a lot of Christians don't want to be honest about the state of the church. I quoted a small portion of N.T. Wright's, Small Faith – Great God, the other day where he noted that Christians often want to walk by sight instead of by faith. We want the perfect church, and when we don't see it, we think we have failed. We then think we need to concede the fact that we are all a bunch of hypocrites, nevermind that most people just want us to be real and to stop creating a façade that masks who we really are. But because we want to avoid being honest, we respond in a number of different ways, as Eugene Peterson notes in Practice Resurrection:
A lot of [people] seem to have no idea what is going on. What they see is chaos: hostility, injury, brokenness, church fights, church sleaze, church grandstanding, religious wars. Many of them find a place in the bleachers with a few other likeminded people and make do with what they find there. They survive by ignoring what they find confusing and disorienting. They remove their attention from what is taking place on the field (in the congregation, in the denomination). They do pray together, study together, socialize together. Life in the bleachers isn't all that bad.
There are other people who are so disturbed by what they perceive as chaos on the playing field that they decide to 'do something about it.' They want a game that looks like a game, a church that looks like a church, where no one gets hurt and everything is orderly and stays in place. They understand church as something they need to take charge of. And of course, there are a great many people who just walk out and look for a game that they are already familiar with or go home and turn on the television where they can satisfy, if you can call it that, their religious needs by picking a brand without dealing personally with either God or people.
The point is that willful ignorance, creating alternative realities, or abandonment are not the answers to the mess we see when we look at the church. As Wright said in the short quote I posted the other day, we walk by faith. We are not going to get this right all on our own. Peterson again:
I don't think we have to make any apologies that church is not conspicuously prominent as a place of peace... The church in its deepest being, as it is in itself, the ontological church comprises a vast company of men and women in all stages of maturity: crawling infants and squalling babies, awkward and inpulsive adolescents, harassed and fatigued parents, and occasional holy men and holy women who have it all together. All of us who understand and practice peace in the company of Jesus, who is our peace, have a lot of maturing to do. About the time we are becoming mature (if we ever do), we find that we have brought another generation into the world that has to go through the whole process once again. Humankind does not mature all at once. And so peace is constantly in the making, and also constantly at risk.
...When anyone looks at church as a performance, whether from inside our outside, mostly what they see is skinned knees and sprained ankles, awkward, bungled attempts at keeping the peace. But we also know that at the source and center of church, Jesus is our peace. And so we don't quit.
Jesus is our peace. When we try to 'fix' the church with our own solutions or try to cover up who we really are, we hurt ourselves, we cease to bear witness to the transforming power of the gospel, and we block the way for true peace in our churches. Being honest about who we are and putting our faith in Jesus, embracing the new life we have in him, is the first step we need to take. True peace comes only through Jesus, the source and life of the church.
One can foster religious convictions on one's own, but we have Christian faith only in the fellowship of the church. Private Christianity is wooden iron. A church that is like a restaurant, where all kinds of customers sit at individual tables and are served by waiters who rush here and there attempting to meet their wishes, is wooden iron too. If any comfort consists in the fact that I do not 'belong to myself,' then there is no comfort for me without having my circling around myself taken away from me. Where the church is, there a redemption comes into view that redeems me not simply as an individual, but redeems me also from my individualism. So to be a Christian means to be in the church.
Article 55 expounds this. It says rightly first off that all Christians together and each individually – as members of Christ – 'share in one fellowship with Christ' and in his gifts. For the Head of the community is not only the key to what the community is. He is also the reason that Christian life is life in fellowship. Jesus Christ is Immanuel, God's guarantee to be God in fellowship with us humans. As such, Jesus Christ is also the fulfillment of the double command of love, in which the vertical and the horizontal, the God-human relationships and the human-human relationship are insolubly linked. If the Holy Spirit brings us into relationship with this God who in Christ keeps fellowship with us, then faith means: 'fellowship with Christ.' If we come into fellowship with him, we come into fellowship with all with whom he keeps fellowship. None of us can be a child of God in the Holy Spirit without being together with other children of God who now may and should discover one another as sisters and brothers. That 'the Son of God...gathers, protects, and preserves' the church does not take away the responsibility of those who experiences this, or make them passive. This action calls them forth and calls them out to answer in word and deed and to confess themselves part of the church gathered and supported by him. They do this because they no longer belong to themselves, but to their faithful Savior (225-226).
Earlier this year, I was in a discussion on what role home visitation should play in the ministry of a church. Home visitation basically entails a visit by the pastoral staff or elders of a church to each family or member of the congregation in their respective homes to inquire about their spiritual well-being, and to provide support, encouragement, and instruction. A few days ago I quoted the Puritan minister, Richard Baxter, on this very issue. Baxter understood how crucial it was for the minister (and by extension, the elders or other pastoral staff responsible for spiritual oversight) to engage in this sort of work. It would not be a stretch to say that for Baxter, the very life of the church, or at least its vitality, hinged on faithfully carrying out this practice.
To be honest, I was quite shocked by the response of most of those I was talking with; most felt reticent about their churches engaging in such a practice because it would infringe on the privacy of the members of the church and would implicitly communicate that the leadership of the church was seeking some sort of totalitarian dominance over the lives of its parishioners.
At first I thought maybe they conceived of this as an antiquated practice, done in the days when ministers were not as conscious of being relational or relevant (to borrow a few modern terms) in their ministry. But then it occured to me that perhaps part of the reason some might hesitate to engage in such a practice is simply because they are living in a culture that incessantly bombards them with the message that they are autonomous individuals, subject only to their own authority and responsible only for themselves. The 18th and 19th centuries wove into the fabric of Western – and especially American – culture an aversion toward authority, which has largely defined the Christianity of this culture as well. The emphasis turns on the individual as the primary unit, whether it is an over-emphasis on personal salvation or turning subjective experiences and feelings into objective standards of theology and practice. In turn, this means the individual has full responsibility over their life and spirituality, and the church is there to serve them and meet their felt needs.
But that's not how it is supposed to work in the church.
When you are baptised into the church, either as an infant or later in life upon professing faith, you are brought into a family. You are no longer an autonomous individual, but you have been bound to the community of believers who have a shared identity as those called by God to be his people. Naturally, this does not entail giving up your individuality – indeed, Scripture lauds this as a great gift to the church – but it is a declaration that you now belong to a covenant family, living a shared life together as children of the heavenly Father.
If you have spent any time living with as part of a family, you understand this already. Each member of the family has his or her own life, of course, but the nature of family life, even something as simple as living in the same house, means that these individual lives are going to constantly cross paths. And this crossing of paths is not something that family members try to avoid, but they recognise it as an important part of their life together. A family supports each other, encourages each other, and will call each other to account if need be.
Like a family, this is how it is to be in the church. Your life becomes the life of the others you live together with. While you certainly retain a measure of responsibility for your personal life, this responsibility is also taken up by the other members of the church. Many congregations will make vows to either the parents of a child or to a professing believer on the occasion of their baptism to support them, pray for them, and nurture them in their Christian walk. An extra measure of responsibility for this task is given to the leaders of the church. Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus make the importance of spiritual oversight very clear. Likewise, the author of the letter to the Hebrews, clearly a pastor himself, makes mention at numerous points of looking after the spiritual well-being of those he wrote to.
When I was growing up, my father served as an elder in Christian Reformed congregations in Toronto and Bradford, Ontario, for many years and he will tell you that home visitation was among the most blessed and fruitful time of his ministry as an elder. This was largely because he came to really know the members of the congregation under his oversight, and he then knew how to minister to them more effectively. Now, of course, there are some factors that will determine how successful this practice is, and perhaps key in this regard is ensuring the church has godly elders or pastoral leaders; this was a major concern for Baxter in his discussion of the matter.
I know that there are plenty of pastors and church leaders who understand all this and practice it in one way or another. But I think there is a lot of wisdom and benefit to be gained from practicing it in a systematic way, ensuring that during a period of a year, each member or family of a congregation gets to visit with the church leaders responsible for pastoral oversight. This method has something of a proven historical track record since it has been done for centuries. The simple act itself of stepping into someone's home is an intentional way of deepening the level of intimacy and trust in the relationship of the pastor and parishioner. It is a very concrete way of saying to each member of the church, 'We care deeply for you.' All of this lends itself on the one hand to fostering the spiritual growth of a congregation, and on the other hand to strengthening the bond of fellowship of the church as the members come to understand what it means to be a family.
The Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. Don't think of spiritual oversight as an intrusion into your private life, but welcome it as a blessing. God intends for the leaders he appoints to the church to shepherd his flock because, in Isaiah's words, we all like sheep will go astray and turn to our own ways. The church was designed from the beginning to be a family, and her members are intended to live their life together. Our journey through life is enriched and deepened when we travel with others and help each other stay on the path.
So make a cup of tea, invite the leaders of your church into the living room, and share your lives with each other. Because in the end, it's all about the family.
(Below I've attached a PDF file of a chapter on home visitation from a book my father was given when he first became an elder, called The Elder's Handbook. I believe the authors come out of the Christian Reformed Church. It contains a bit of rationale for the practice, as well as some practical tips for how to do it. I think there are some really helpful suggestions here.)
I am a big fan of getting together with a bunch of theologically-minded guys and spending a few hours together now and then talking about what we have been reading, working through issues that come up in our ministry, or mulling over big questions we have been asking and wrestling with. The preferred setting for this is a pub or coffeeshop, although I'm also perfectly happy to do so while working under the hood of a car, or walking down a city street, or sitting in my living room.
John Stott wished for this sort of thing as well, as a means for ministers to keep their minds sharp and to build each other up. He writes of this being a good practice with a proven historical track record in his book, Between Two Worlds:
I often find myself wishing that local clergy gatherings, whether denominational or interdenominational, could be more effective in stimulating thought. When we meet, we are no doubt obliged to transact some business, but we could also encourage one another in study. The second half of the eighteenth century was the great time for the founding of societies for English clergy, especially evangelicals. The first was Samuel Walker's 'Clerical Club' in Truro (c. 1750), whose purpose was to 'strengthen each other's hands in the work of the Lord'. During the following years about ten others arose in different parts of the country. 'Why may we not meet to pray, when others meet to play at the bowls?' asked Thomas Robinson of Leicester. 'Why may we not have deliberative assemblies, when others of our brethern have their dancing and drinking assemblies? Why may we not seek to edify each other, whilst they care not if they corrupt one another?' The most famous and influential of these clubs was the Eclectic Society, founded in 1783 by John Newton, ex-sea captain and slave trader, but at that time Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the city of London, and his friends. They met every other Monday. 'We begin with tea,' wrote Newton (the teapot is preserved in the Church Missionary House in London); 'then a short prayer introduces a conversation for about three hours upon a proposed subject, and we seldom flag.' He added that the group deserved to be called the Royal Society since 'I trust the members are all of the royal family, and the King Himself condescends to meet with us.' (190)
Not mentioned in Stott's list is the 'White Horse Inn' of Cambridge, or even Martin Luther's frequent practice of having students over to his home for dinner and home-brewed beer to talk about all kinds of different issues; undoubtedly there are many more groups like these. This sort of thing is, I think, a very healthy practice and worth engaging in on a regular basis. Blogging, of course, is one outlet for me to work through all kinds of things I read and think about and questions I am working through, but I would never substitute it entirely for face-to-face conversation with friends, colleagues and mentors. That kind of interaction is invaluable.
So, who'd like to go get a drink or a cup of coffee?
I stumbled across this video tonight, and it was fitting since I've been thinking some about Christians working as police officers. Let me know what you think. I might be blogging more on the subject in the coming weeks.
We don't like the fact that living the Christian life is really, really difficult and so we (sometimes unconsciously) draw up a set of standards for what we think Christians should be like that make a lot of concessions to our culture because then it is easier to make it look like we have it all together, and as a bonus, outsiders will feel more welcome when they are among us. We want to justify the idea that 'Jesus makes everything better,' and we need to create that illusion in order to make it believable.
