Update:Stefan Paas has produced a transcript of his lecture in PDF form, which is available for download here. The paper also clarifies some points and addresses some of the questions that were raised by his talk.
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Stefan Paas is a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, holding the J.H. Bavinck Chair for Church Planting and Church Renewal. He was at the recent Redeemer City to City Europe conference in Berlin where he gave a talk entitled "A European Perspective on Church Planting." If you're involved in ministry in the UK or Europe, I think you'll find this to be very interesting. He raises a lot of important questions to consider about the nature of ministry here and the vision and aims of the church on this continent.
Below is the audio of his session as well as the slides he used during the presentation, which he has now made available.
If you are interested in the rest of the audio sessions of the conference, including some by Tim Keller, they can be found here. Do note that you need to register in order to be able to get access to all of them.
One of the interesting things Eugene Peterson talks about in his book, Practice Resurrection, is an ontological understanding of the church; that is, understanding the church for what it is, not what is does. He observes that the functional understanding of the church is pervasive within the context of American Christianity.
Americans talk and write endlessly about what the church needs to become, what the church must do to be effective. The perceived failures of the church are analyzed and reforming strategies prescribed. The church is understood almost exclusively in terms of function – what we can see. If we can't see it, it doesn't exist. Everything is viewed through the lens of pragmatism. Church is an instrument that we have been given to bring about whatever Christ commanded us to do. Church is a staging ground for getting people motivated to continue Christ's work.
This way of thinking – church as a human activity to be masured by human expectations – is pursued unthinkingly. The huge reality of God already at work in all operations of the Trinity is benched on the sideline while we call timeout, huddle together with our heads bowed, and figure out a strategy by which we can compensate for God's regrettable retreat into invisibility. This is dead wrong, and it is responsible for no end of shallowness and experimentation in trying to acheive success and relevance and effectiveness that people can see. Statistics provide the basic vocabulary for keeping score. Programs provide the game plan. This way of going about things has done and continues to do immeasurable damage to the American church.
There is little to add to Peterson's remarks here; he is, of course, spot on. We become so wrapped up in our numbers and statistics and methods and practices that we entirely lose sight of the fact that the church is first and foremost a living body that Christ, as the head, has promised to preserve for all time (Matt. 16:8). It is not primarily about what we do. To be sure, God has entrusted us with certain things that we must do as the church – faithfully preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, and so on – but these are intended to nourish the life of this living body. And what we do in the world – looking after the orphan and widow, bearing witness to the Kingdom of God and embodying an alternative reality of life transformed by the gospel – is not to build up numbers or raise money, but simply to remain faithful to the calling God has entrusted to us, proclaiming the gospel, making disciples, and bringing shalom to a broken and hurting world. If we see numerical growth, praise God! But this should not be our primary motivation.
Recently, there was a church that celebrated an anniversary of some sort (five or ten years or something like that), and to celebrate they wanted to fly some new church planters out to their church so they could see how things are done. I am sure that their intention was only to be supportive and encouraging of other church planters, but what seemed to come to the forefront was a deep faith in programs and methods. Effectively, what they were saying was that they had figured out something that enabled them to go from a small core group to several thousands of members in a short time span, and others needed to adopt these methods if they wanted the same results. It was numbers and statistics that proved God was blessing them.
It is so easy to get caught up in this because we want that visible, tangible proof that God is blessing us. We cannot disconnect from the idea that numerical growth equals blessing and success. We want to see results – big church buildings, big budgets, front page articles in newspapers, people flocking to learn from us. Our barometer for faithfulness is statistics, and when our statistics are not good, we think our strategies have failed. That is business and economics, but the church is neither. Writes Peterson,
This way of understanding church is...very, very wrong. We can no more understand church functionally than we can understand Jesus functionally. We have to submit ourselves to the revelation and receive church as the gift of Christ as he embodies himself in the world. Paul tells us that Christ is the head of the body, and the body is church. Head and body are one thing.
'Ontology' is a word that can get us past this clutter of functionalism... [Church] is far wider, deeper, higher than anything it does, or anything we can take charge of or manipulate... Church is not something that we cobble together to do something for God. It is the 'fullness of him who fills all in all' (Eph. 1:23) working comprehensively with and for us.
Now, I am not saying that big churches are wrong (although I'm a proponent of small, multiplying churches), or that a big church is actually an unfaithful church. The point is that the measure of a church's faithfulness is not so easy to see. Helping to lead people to put their faith in Christ and to be baptised is only one part of the church's task, and we cannot say that our work is done when someone is converted. No, that is only the beginning. A lifetime of discipleship must follow as we walk hand in hand with fellow believers learning to embody the transformative power of the gospel and learning to live in a way that honours Christ's lordship over all of life.
That, of course, is not so easily measurable. But maybe that is the point.
The church is what it is regardless of what we do, and thankfully so, because left to our own devices we make one big mess of it all. It saves us from pride and from putting our faith in what we do. When we come to understand the church for what it is – ontologically – we begin to understand that it is not our responsibility to create or jump-start the life of the church. We are, instead, participants in the life that Christ gives his church. He is the head and we are the body, and anything that we are to do flows from who he is and what he has called us to be.
Throughout the centuries, the church has been plagued by divisions and schisms. It is most prevalent in the American church, but it is not a problem unique to it. I grew up in Dutch Reformed churches, a body whose history is marked by much of the same (although to a lesser degree). Indeed, most any tradition will have groups who have split off and formed new bodies in the name of truth.
The decision to leave a church is of no little significance. Because of the weight of such a decision, there have been some voices throughout history who have urged patience and caution against acting rashly in such a matter, including J.C. Ryle. As I have continued reading Knots Untied, I came across a warning he issued to those within the Church of England who, I assume, were threatening to leave. He writes,
It is a cheap and easy remedy to secede from a Church when we see evils round us, but it is not always the wisest one. To pull down a house because the chimney smokes, to chop off a hand because we have cut our finger, to forsake a ship because she has sprung a leak and makes a little water,—all this we know is childish impatience. But is it a wise man's act to forsake a Church because thing in our own parish, and under our own minister in that Church, are wrong? I answer decidedly and unhesitatingly, No!
It is not so sure as it seems that we mend matters by leaving the Church of England. Every man knows the faults of his own house, but he never knows the faults of another till he moves into it, and then perhaps he finds he is worse off than he was before his move. There are often smoky chimneys, and bad drains, and draughts, and doors that will not shut, and windows that will not open, in No. 2 as well as in No. 1. All is not perfect among Dissenters and Plymouth Brethren. We may find to our cost, if we join them in disgust with the Church of England, that we have only changed one sort of evil for another, and that the chimney smokes in chapel as well as in church.
This is, in part, familiar advice. We have all had someone warn us of buying into the notion that the proverbial grass is greener on the other side, and that is wisdom to heed. Some, though, may question the extent of the concessions Ryle would make to remain in a church. What conditions would need to be present for him to finally break communion with (in his case) the Church of England?
When the Thirty-Nine articles are altered,—when the Prayer-book is revised on Romish principles and filled with Popery,—when the Bible is withdrawn from the reading desk,—when the pulpit is shut against the Gospel,—when the mass is formally restored in every parish church by Act of Parliament,—when, in fact, our present order of things in the Church of England is altered by statute, and Queen, Lords, and Commons command that our parish churches shall be given over to processions, incense, crosses, images, banners, flowers, gorgeous vestments, idolatrous veneration of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, mumbled prayers, gabbled-over apocryphal lessons, short, dry, sapless sermons, histrionic gestures and postures, bowings, crossings, and the like,—when these things come to pass by law and rule, then it will be time for us all to leave the Church of England. Then we may arise and say with one voice, 'Let us depart, for God is not here.'
You sometimes hear people quip that churches split because of an inability to agree on what colour the carpet in the building should be, emphasising the fact that sometimes churches will divide for the most trivial of reasons. Ryle would certainly not fall into that category, because he maintained a firm conviction that he should fight for the truth:
But till that time,—and God forbid it should ever come: till that time,—and when it does come, there will be a good many seceders: till that time let us stand fast, and fight for the truth. Let us not desert our post to save trouble, and move out to please our adversaries, and spike our guns to avoid a battle. No! in the name of God, let us fight on, even if we are like the 300 at Thermopylae,—few of us, many against us, and traitors on every side. Let us fight on, and contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.
One of the things I have come to understand is that for the British, there is a great reticence to take such a drastic step as leaving a church. They do not share the revolutionary spirit of the Americans, and tend to favour the existing establishment. This is not to say that they do so uncritically—indeed, Ryle was an Anglican by conviction—but it helps to explain his profound concern to remain united. It would be interesting to see how Ryle would react today to issues like the ordination of women in the Church of England. Would he add that to his list of necessary conditions for leaving?
I would be interested in further discussion on what is required for unity and/or separation. On what grounds do we draw our boundaries? What is the standard for determining if we have fellowship with another group or denomination, and is there a different standard for coming into full unity with them? What conditions are to be met if we are to have sufficient reason to leave a church? What do you think?
I ask you to assist me by cultivating and encouraging a spirit of brotherly love, charity and forbearance among Churchmen. In a fallen world like ours, and in a free country like England, it is vain to expect all men to see all things alike and to interpret the language of the formularies precisely in the same way. Let us on no account be colourless Christians, destitute of any distinct opinions. But so long as any brother walks loyally within the limits of the Articles and the Prayer Book, let us respect him and treat him courteously, even when we do not altogether agree with him.
Ryle had a profound concern for unity within the Church of England, but he consistently maintained that it had to be a principled unity, rooted in the adherence to the 39 Articles of Religion and the Prayer Book. In an essay on the Articles in Knots Untied, Ryle notes that in his day, many looked to the Prayer Book alone as "the real measure and gauge of a Churchman" (53), in many cases entirely disregarding the Articles. Of course, the Prayer Book was never intended to be the doctrinal standard of the Church of England; Ryle points to the original title of the Articles given by Thomas Cranmer himself: "Articles agreed upon for the avoiding of Diversities of Opinion, and for the stablishing of Consent touching true Religion."
A committed evangelical, Ryle nevertheless maintained that in the Church of England one did not have to be an evangelical to be a Christian, a position which some evangelicals in his day were taking. In his Principles for Churchmen, he wrote that the Church of England, as a national church, had to be comprehensive, but with certain boundaries defining the limits of that comprehensiveness:
Those limits, I believe, are to be found in the Articles, the Creeds and the Book of Common Prayer... They are documents, no doubt, which all do not interpret alike. As long as the world stands, and as long as language is what it is, you will never get men to place precisely the same meaning on theological phrases and words. But, however variously we may interpret the Articles, the Creeds and the Prayer Book, they are unmistakable limits, fences and bounds within which the National Church requires its ministers to walk, and he that flatly rejects them, denies them, contradicts them, and transgresses them is in his wrong place inside the Church of England.
Attempts at unity today rarely demonstrate such firm committment to doctrinal unity as Ryle speaks of. The perception usually being that doctrine is what divides the church, most seek unity elsewhere, taking something of a lowest common denominator approach. For Ryle, this was the problem with those in the Church of England who sought unity apart from the doctrinal foundation laid out by the 39 Articles.
This is not just a question the Church of England has to deal with, but one that every denomination, federation, or network has to address. For the last several years, I have been part of a Presbyterian church, and the doctrinal standard here is the Westminster Standards. The interesting thing with the Standards is that they are far more detailed than the 39 Articles, and so the question for Presbyterian churchmen is not just whether or not they adhere to the Standards, but to what degree. Some maintain that it must be a strict subscription, confessing adherence to every single part of the Standards, while others argue for some breathing room on various points. It seems, however, that the unity Ryle looks for is quite a bit broader than the Presbyterians I know. I'll return to this in a later post, because this is where it becomes really tricky.
If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that the question of unity is one I think of often. Ryle intrigues me for this reason. If we are being honest, we must admit that often people with theological convictions like Ryle, those of an orthodox and Reformed perspective, do not share his passion for unity.
For now, these are largely just musings. Defining churchmanship and unity are very big questions that a simple blog post will not answer adequately.
Hermann Sasse, a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian, had this to say regarding humanity's efforts to create an ideal church:
Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia, 'Where Christ is, there is the church'. With this saying one of the oldest church fathers spoke of the mystery of the church. The saying also sums up Luther’s faith in the church. It is not the power of our faith, nor the holiness of our life that constitutes the church, but rather that 'Where Christ is, there is the church'. When the church is called a holy people, a communion of saints, it is not to be understood in the way it has often been understood in the history of the church: 'the church should be a holy people, therefore only the holy shall belong to her. Away with all the unholy! The honour of Christ demands it!' When the worst of sinners must be excluded from the fellowship, one must then begin to classify sins in order to determine which ones lead to exclusion. How often has not that been attempted, both in the past and more recently. How imposing was the strictness of the ancient church, when people sought to create a holy and pure church (as also happens now). Or consider the Donatists, who demanded that at least the clergy should be free of mortal sin. Whenever the attempt has been made to create an ideal church, the end result has always been bitter disappointment. The community of saints turns into a community of Pharisees.
As the Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, notes in the fourth volume of his Reformed Dogmatics, 'according to Scripture the characteristic essence of the church lies in the fact that it is the people of God' (298), of which Christ is the head. The church exists because Christ 'gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith' (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 54).
The church is not primarily an institution, nor is it a group of people who live perfectly holy lives or believe all the right things. To be sure, the church does have an institutional character, and its members do strive to be increasingly holy and to be faithful to Scripture in their doctrine. But none of these precede the fact that the church people of God, over which Christ is Lord.
