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.

(HT: Anthony Bradley, via Paul McCain)

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John P. Burgess, in his book, After Baptism: Shaping the Christian Life, writes the following:

Hunger and thirst...teach us that humans ultimately live in a state of dependence. If we understand them rightly, we have to confess that we receive life as God's gift. Even the energies that we expend in taking care of ourselves and our basic needs are finally sustained by powers and forces beyond ourselves. Every day of our lives, we are dependent on food and drink to keep us alive. We never eat and drink once and for all; we have to eat and drink again and again, and so we continually pray, 'Give us this day, our daily bread.'
 
So too we are dependent on God's grace for our basic identity. We can never simply choose to be whoever we want. Nor will we ever know ourselves well enough to say, 'I finally have it all together. I have no need of God or others.' Dependence on daily bread symbolizes our dependence on God for our life's meaning and purpose. Our baptismal identity, like our physical energies, must be renewed every day. We need daily sustenance in the life to which Christ has called us. For that reason, 'one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God' (Matt. 4:4).
 
This daily sustenance comes to Christians in Word, sacrament, and patterns and rhythyms of life together. God feeds us again and again. God continually renews our capacity to receive Christ's self-giving love and, then, to offer our very selves to God and others. 'Give us this day, our daily bread' is never just a call for physical nourishment, but is also a plea for the bread of heaven that is life in the risen Lord.
 
In the end, Jesus himself must feed us and quench our thirst. He declares, 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty' (John 6:35), for 'the water that I will give them will become in them like a spring of living water gushing up to eternal life' (John 4:14). Christians have found this spiritual food and drink whenever they have celebrated the Eucharist. Baptism first marks us in our new identity in Christ, while the Eucharist gives us strength to persist in our baptismal identity, even in the midst of trial and temptation. Baptism sends us into the world, and the Eucharist offers us food and drink for the journey. Baptism tells us who we really are, and the Eucharist deepens and confirms our identity. Font leads to table. The helpless baby we place in God's hands will surely receive the basic nutrition that she needs to live out her baptism (122).

The Eucharist is not just a memorial. Through it Christ sustains us and gives us life. Let us stop starving ourselves of the nourishment he gives.

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If you are not familiar with Lesslie Newbigin's story, he grew up in Britain and studied at Cambridge, where he was converted and trained for the ministry. After getting married, he spent nearly forty years in India as a missionary. When he was in Britain as a child and a student, it was still something of a "Christian" society, but upon his return in 1974, he discovered a country that he could describe as nothing less than pagan.

Michael Goheen, in his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin's missionary ecclesiology (which is available online for free!), writes that Newbigin had come to understand the church's relationship to the culture as a missionary encounter because "the church embodies the gospel as an alternative way of life to the culture in which it is set and thereby challenges the culture's fundamental assumptions" (365). Newbigin borrowed language from the sociology of knowledge to express this notion of a missionary encounter in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He writes,

The gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception (9).

Goheen adds that "all cultures exhibit a plausibility structure that embody and transmit the fundamental beliefs of its inhabitants. Those fundamental beliefs stand in opposition to the gospel and if there is to be a missionary encounter, the church itself must be a community that embodies an alternative set of foundational beliefs" (365-366). If the church is faithful in doing this then three things will result: first, the foundational beliefs of a culture will be challenged; second, the church will offer the gospel as a credible alternative way of life; and third, the church will call the culture to radical conversion and invite it to live and understand the world through the lens of the gospel. At that point, the culture is left with the choice of accepting or rejecting the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Newbigin expresses it in his little book, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches, the church that embodies the gospel

must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole 'fiduciary framework' within which our culture operates. It must call unequivocally for radical conversion, a conversion of the mind so that things are seen differently, and a conversion of the will so that things are done differently. It must decline altogether the futile attempt to commend the biblical vision of how things are by seeking to adjust it to the assumptions of our culture (53).

The fact that Newbigin would say something this provocative in the context he did was significant, for he was speaking about a culture that, to some degree, still believed it was a Christian culture, much like America today. But Newbigin understands that just because a certain percentage of a culture's population professes belief in God or attends church regularly does not mean its underlying worldview is shaped by the gospel.

Further, he rightly recognizes that the worldviews that give shape to a culture are religious in nature. Religion, in Newbigin's view, is not just a cultural form, and "it is more than an institution that embodies beliefs and practices concerning God and the destiny of the soul. It is a set of ultimate commitments about the nature of the world that gives shape, direction, and meaning to life and demands final loyalty" (Goheen, 367).

And here, then, is the reason the gospel needs to challenge the foundational beliefs of a culture—because all of life is religion, and everything we think, say, and do is either in service to God or an idol. Christ is Lord over all of life, and the church is called to proclaim and embody this truth. As witnesses to Jesus and the presence of his kingdom and rule, we cannot be satisfied to accept a sacred/secular divide and leave our culture to let its presuppositions inform certain areas while challenging its assumptions in other areas. All of life belongs to the Lord and our calling as the church is to unapologetically call to the world to recognize that truth.

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Lesslie Newbigin, the renowned missionary theologian, writes the following in his 1989 book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society:

The logic of mission is this: the true meaning of the human story has been disclosed. Because it is the truth, it must be shared universally. It cannot be private opinion. When we share it with all peoples, we give them the opportunity to know the truth about themselves, to know who they are because they can know the true story of which their lives are a part. Wherever the gospel is preached the question of the meaning of the human story—the universal and the personal story of each human being—is posed. Thereafter the situation can never be the same. It can never revert to the old harmonies, the old securities, the old static or cyclical patterns of the past. Now decisions have to be made for or against Christ, for Christ as the clue to history or for some other clue. There will always be the temptation, even for those within the Christian community, to find the clue in the success of some project of our own, to see our program (whether of church growth or of human development) as the success story which is going to give meaning to our lives. The gospel calls us back again and again to the real clue, the crucified and risen Jesus, so that we learn that the meaning of history is not immanent in history itself, that history cannot find its meaning at the end of a process of development, but that history is given its meaning by what God has done in Jesus Christ and by what he has promised to do; and that the true horizon is not at the successful end of our projects but in his coming to reign…

We believe that the truth about the human story has been disclosed in the events which form the substance of the gospel. We believe, therefore, that these events are the real clue to the story of every person, for every human life is part of the whole human story and cannot be understood apart from that story. It follows then that the test of our real belief is our readiness to share it with all peoples (125-126).

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A short time ago, I mentioned and quoted from Gary Badcock's book on ecclesiology, The House Where God Lives, and as I read through his discussion of the mission of the church the other day, I found myself increasingly tempted to purchase the book, even with its $27 pricetag.

There is much worth thinking about in this section, a lot of it echoing the insights of missiologists such as David Bosch and Lesslie Newbigin. I found the following, in which Badcock links the mission of the church with the resurrection, to be very significant:

In the New Testament, indeed, the mission of the church is closely connected with the pivotal event of the resurrection of Jesus. It is in the Gospel of John that the link between the resurrection and the mission is clearest, for that is where Jesus' central appearance to his disciples, following his rising from the dead, brings both the bestowal of the Spirit and the ultimate commissioning for the missionary expansion that followed: 'As the Father has sent me, so I send you' (John 20:21). This statement picks up on themes scattered elsewhere in John's Gospel (e.g., John 17:1-3, 18, 23); and particularly when it is coupled with the teaching of Paul, it helps us understand what the character of the resurrection appearances might have been. The emphasis falls less on epiphany than on commissioning, or, to put the real point more precisely, it falls on sharing Christ's mission. The implication of all of this would be that where there is little appreciation of the importance of the Christian mission, there is a limited grasp of the resurrection faith. Therefore, whatever the cultural difficulties implicit in embracing mission as central to the doctrine of the church, the theological theme can scarcely be avoided.

There is a lot packed into this paragraph worth thinking about, not least of which is how our view of the mission of the church is linked to our understanding (or lack thereof) of the resurrection.

Another recently published book on ecclesiology, coming from the standpoint of biblical theology, is written by Graham Twelftree, entitled, People of the Spirit: Exploring Luke's View of the Church. Using insights from the books of Luke and Acts, he draws out the implications of the church's mission being centered on the living Christ, and in doing so, reflects and expands on what Badcock is saying. Consider this:

Perhaps, above all else, Luke would say that the Church is the present and ongoing embodiment of Jesus and his mission. It is not that the Church is simply Christ-like or is to mirror and maintain the ministry of Jesus through emulating his activities and message. Rather, through receiving the empowerment and direction of the Spirit, the Church embodies and expresses that same powerful presence of God apparent in Jesus and his ministry...Not only does the life of the Church begin in Jesus' ministry, but also the life of Jesus continues in the ministry of the Church...

[Luke's] positive conclusion that the Church is fundamentally Christo-centric also stands as a critique of some contemporary understandings of the Church. For example, the Church is sometimes seen as essentially a community. But, for Luke, the Church is not fundamentally a community, though it is, in part, communal. In that Jesus is said to appoint a group (note Acts 1:21), Luke signals that he understood the Church was not a collection of individuals related to him but a community of his followers. Yet, for its identity, the Church depended on the call of Jesus not its collecting or being together. Also, the Church is sometimes seen as those gathered around the cross. However, for Luke, the community of the Church is not determined by gathering around or under the cross, it is gathered around the living Jesus...the Church is called into existence by Jesus and has its raison d'être in its ongoing embodiment of his life and mission.

That the church is gathered around the living Jesus is a significant point; in the book of Acts, for example, most the recorded sermons are centered on proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead and continues to live. It is this living Christ who gave the apostles the commission to go to all the nations and preach the good news. And it is this same living and resurrected Jesus who needs to continue to be the focal point of the church's mission today.

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