Challenging the Church 4.20.2023

     Some of you, perhaps read this blog regularly. If so, you might conclude that I have a limited perspective since I seem to regularly “harp” on a few very select themes. There is not much point in changing the subject till things change. In virtually every problem area that confronts the contemporary church, these are the issues that need to be addressed. 

    This month we are talking about the Church. The Church is the body and bride of Christ. There are “body” issues, hygiene if you will that need to be addressed. This can be challenging. Like humans, individual congregations can develop “body image” issues.  And like a devoted friend, the preacher will occasionally need to challenge the church to conform to what Christ expects of His body. Here are some basic challenges the responsible preacher will address with regularity. 

Christ Focused. 

    Not merely worshipping Christ but imitating Him. When the Church slips into a sort of public spectacle, experience-oriented religiosity it can be extremely attractive to those who wish to mold the Church into something other than Christ’s Body.  The body of Christ gathers for worship but most Christ-focused living is conducted outside of worship. By Christ-focused I mean bearing the fruit of the Spirit and approaching every other human person with humility, compassion, kindness, and love. In an environment that lacks those very attributes most associated with Jesus, fruit-bearing is our primary job. 

    And many professing Christians don’t want to hear it and don’t want to do it. Many want the Church to speak with a harsh tone and a condemnatory voice. We don’t need to go out of our way looking for opportunities to remind our congregations that Jesus was humble, compassionate, kind, and loving. We have the chance every time we take our text from one of the Gospels.  Even when we consider some of the less flattering things Paul said we often find that his most severe criticisms were not for outsiders but for insiders. When we say challenging things to our churches, we are following the Pauline model of Christocentric preaching.

    Do not misread me. I will get to doctrine and how to correctly preach it. Being doctrinally “correct” is only a part of what it means to be a Christian and it must be subordinate to and combined with bearing the fruit of the Spirit. The attributes Jesus modeled for us were not insipid, unfocused, or fickle. The first thing we must understand, if we are to be Christian in more than name is the requirement to be like him. This means understanding the interlocking contexts of world and Church. The prime purpose to which we are called is not to win arguments or “advance” any cause other than the cause of Christ. Culture is not an enemy we attack but composed of image-bearers that we seek to influence and evangelize.

Text-driven and Exegetical

      Maybe, rather than asking about someone’s “favorite preacher” we should ask about their favorite exegete. Instead of asking about a preacher’s sermons, we should discuss their hermeneutics. 

    When we read scripture faithfully, critically, contextually, canonically, and reasonably we will discover that many of the treasured concepts of the modern evangelical subculture are marginal at best or even absent from the earliest Christian preaching, teaching, and theology. 

    The NT does not tell people how to vote, because no one voted in the First Century. It does, however, help us to understand how to inspect the fruit our shepherds bear, and the fruit borne by any who might want to be leaders in society. 

    The NT does not authorize the Church to supplant civil authorities. The NT clearly teaches that the kingdom Jesus proclaimed arrived with Him and has been growing ever since. The desire for some to subordinate society to our whims is to fail the wilderness test of Jesus and to allow the lust for power and desire for empire to delude us into doing what He would not. 

    The NT does not directly address abortion. It does however provide guidance for how a believer in Jesus should treasure life. The key phrase here is believer in Jesus. The Bible teaches (that would be Jesus, John, Paul, Peter, and James) that developing faith in Christ reaches an inflection point traditionally called “conversion.” At conversion one is filled with the Holy Spirit. Those outside of Christ are not filled with the Holy Spirit and we should not expect them to behave like it, require that they share our viewpoints, or enforce that viewpoint upon them. 

    The NT does not teach us to sensationalize the sins of others whilst minimizing our own. All sin separates from God and all (all, all, all) sin can be forgiven. My sin, your sin, their sin. All the same to God. A graceless Church is an anomaly. It is your job and mine to challenge the Church to read and apply scripture correctly. Even the hard parts.

    Examples could be multiplied. And when you and I preach many will find the message of the NT challenging. Some may even get angry. Your job is to challenge the Church with the truth, not coddle it with cultural pablum. 

    I often wonder why the contemporary Church focusses so narrowly and persistently on issues that the Apostles either ignored or discussed peripherally. Conclusion? The Bible is hard and requires thought. Despite promises to the contrary, there are not a lot of “simple principles," “basic beliefs,” or “quick fixes”. And when read in context some of the most famous summaries and simplifications of “what the Bible says” are plainly wrong or read so far out of context that they could mean anything to anyone. Clever ideas drawn from decontextualized texts, wrongly read, and hastily applied will not solve our problem—they are the problem. 

Theologically Nuanced

    Nuance implies flexibility and adaptability rather than rigidity. That doesn’t mean that the Bible is not true. Far from it! It merely recognizes that true things are often subtle, complicated, and contextual. There is a reason that there are so many systematic theologies. Systematic Theology is a synthetic attempt to manage the organic complexity of Scripture. To put it plainly the Bible is too hard for some so they simplify it into manageable (or should I say controllable) slices. 

    Christian Biblical Theology recognizes that Jesus is the ultimate arbiter of spiritual truth “The Word made flesh.” So, for Christians Theology must be incarnational and textual. Jesus and His authorized Apostolic interpreters determine the arc of understanding for the whole Bible. 

    Now many of us, even most of us, were not taught this way. We learned OT stories as the background for NT truths.  This is only helpful so long as we keep Jesus at the heart of our reading. Unfortunately, what is a useful heuristic tool for some has become a dangerous weapon for others. And so, we have multiple approaches to systematic theology all of which really amount to pointless attempts to find a theological center for the Christian faith other than Jesus. When we focus on Christ, when we exegete and interpret all scripture rightly, and when we accept the complex or even “messy” theology found in the Biblical story we will be on the sounder ground even when people are unsatisfied with our stand or berate us for failing to flog their favorite targets. 

Historically Informed

    We did not get to this historical moment first, alone, or by accident. Becoming unfocused has been a trait in the Church all the way back to Galatia. Our first historical context is Scripture. Next, we examine the three-hundred years of Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Church History in which the Church was fighting for her existence. The Apologists spoke to fallen culture in general while others addressed heresy. And then Constantine found a ready partner for organizing his empire in the early Catholic Church. For 1200 years Church and Empire marched hand-in-glove until men like Jan Hus laid the egg that Luther and Calvin hatched. Protestant State-Church hegemony gave way to the free-Church movement, The new world was discovered, and it seemed like everyone went searching for influence, power, and wealth. 

    Wow! That was a quick summary of Christian history, but it hits the high points and establishes the principle that we sure don’t seem to learn much from the past.  When illustrating sermons, we should rely on more than puppies, problems, poems, and practical solutions. And we certainly don’t need any more emotion. We need to explain clearly that there are consequences to our decisions. Some of the best material available for driving home and applying scripture comes from both “secular” and “sacred” history (I was going to say “past” history...but there isn’t really any other kind.) We need to remind people that the coalition between Empire and Church has been tried before and that every single time the Church loses its identity in such an arrangement.

 Our people need to know that this moment is not as unique as it might seem or as singular as the Press proclaims. Nothing new under the sun still applies. Our spiritual ancestors have been reading and applying scripture for nearly 2100 years in circumstances just like our own. The culture teases us with promises of some new kind of rapprochement and many are eager to respond to those whispers. If we do not know History then the story of Jesus, the texts which tell it, and the theology which undergirds it disappears into the black hole of uncaring ignorance. My goal is to not stand idly by while that happens.