We’ve decided it’s time for a revival. Change is in the air; the prayer meeting is well attended, and now we’ve begun an additional, fortnightly meeting praying more specifically for a great moving of the Spirit. And it seems the time is right. People are disillusioned with where the ideals of secularism have left them. The occasional minor celebratory has been converting to some form of the Christian faith. Mass attendance is up at the local Roman Catholic Church. So we club together – us and a few other churches, with representatives from the Christian Unions and a few charities – to seek the Lord’s help in what might be done. Plans are made and strategies are drawn up. A lot of time is spent thinking over our name, and designating someone with skills in graphic design to do the logo. We settle on a shortlist of two: Kingdom Renewed Ministries, and Renewal Gospel Partnership. The meeting is adjourned so members can prayerfully think it over. We’ll come back together to vote on it next week.
Is this what we need, though? This has been the pattern of church renewal in the last couple of centuries, in Britain and America at least. We’ve always done things beyond the local church. But for most of Christian history the normative place of experiencing Christian fellowship and the ministries of word and sacrament has been the local parish church. That was one of the central aims of the Protestant reformers, who wanted to eschew the plethora of extra-ecclesial (in the narrow sense of the word) structures of monastic orders, confraternities, and endless layers of hierarchy, to return to ecclesiastical structures more reminiscent of the primitive church. But the extra-institutional drive of the evangelical revivals – in part a reaction against the fierce ecclesiological debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – moved the focus of experimental Protestantism away from the local church (with its emphasis on structured ecclesiology, careful theology, discipline, and ordered administration of the sacraments) and placed it instead in a pan-denominational, conversionistic, and subjectivist religious experience found in gatherings that were deliberately anti-institutional in nature. As nineteenth-century liberalism took a hold in the universities and upper echelons of the established church, the exodus from proper ecclesiastical structures continued. In the late-nineteenth century it seemed obvious to the founders of the Christian Union movement in the universities that the institutional church was not the place to find a living, breathing Christianity. We needed CUs, camps, and Movements (with a capital M) to guarantee a Christianity that was not crumbling in its dryness.
The problems with such an approach are manifold, and have begun to be recognised. To start with, the New Testament knows no mission to the world save the church – and by that I mean the local church, no matter your view of its ecclesiological relationship to the church catholic. That church is defined in part by an evangelistic mission, yes; but one that is indelibly tied up with actual discipleship, with the cultural transformation that necessarily goes with discipleship, and with the full gamut of church life as defined by the scope of scripture. It is a church which preaches the word in its fullness, not simply what a particular cultural manifestation of Christianity deems to be ‘the primary issues’, knowing as it does that the whole counsel of God is necessary for a life that is to honour God in its wholeness. It is a church which recognises the problems of life in a human community, even despite the Spirit’s work, and so seeks to practice church discipline in line with the scriptural testimonies that establish the true patterns of a healthy church. It is a church which practices due observation of the sacramental ordinances as defined under the new covenant. And, most importantly, it is a church which does not practice simply one element of a healthy Christian life, be that evangelism, preaching, ‘social justice’, or community involvement. Instead, its chief goals are the ends for which God established his church, as revealed in holy scripture: the worship and glorifying of the living God, according to the means and patterns ordained in his Word. And in that sense, this church is a foretaste of eternity, an outpost of a redeemed humanity in a dark and fallen world.
The ‘para-church’, by contrast, absents itself from such thoroughly scriptural practices. Or more, it establishes for itself the right simply to pick and choose which biblical patterns are its remit. It needs no elders or deacons, and its leaders need not meet the standards of godly leadership outlined in the New Testament epistles (though, I grant, many aspire to that). It has no sacraments. It need not regulate its worship with ‘reverence and awe’. It can take one aspect of the Christian life, or the mission of the church, and augment it out of all proportion. And all these things because it is ‘not a church’. It would be a category error to apply to it the standards of the New Testament church.
These things I would not so much mind, except that the para-church has now – after three centuries of growing influence – outgrown its station. Like a medieval Catholic renewal movement, it has come to influence the policies and practices of the established church. Many evangelical churches have become ‘seeker friendly’, their chief criteria for the liturgical structure of their services apparently being its appearance to the outsider (who might feel uncomfortable, we are told, if a church feels too much like a church) rather than the statutes of the living God – the God whom scripture reveals to be zealous for the purity of his worship. (Paradoxically, as I have written before, this loss of the Godwardness of church undermines our mission to a world that is now so starved of anything transcendent or divine.) People care little for the sacraments; nor does ecclesiology matter much. Church becomes all about evangelism, rather than all about worship. At its worst, churches can end up feeling more focused on the outsider than the believer, more concerned with appearances before man than purity before God. And if the purpose of church is to make ‘disciple-making disciples’, then where, we might ask, does it stop? What is the purpose of the church, save augmentation of its numbers?
Confessionalism, too, is lost, and comes to be replaced by a thin biblicism. Para-churches are built on lowest-common-denominator Christianity. We don’t talk about baptism, because people disagree on that. Or ecclesiology, eschatology, the extent of the atonement, gender, or covenant theology. It seems to work for the CUs movement to have so brief a statement of faith, so why not churches also? Indeed, many evangelical churches in Britain base their statement of faith on the UCCF’s statement, a theological declaration purposefully designed to include as many evangelicals as possible. (Ironically, many of these churches are Anglican, and do already have a confessional statement that is much fuller, richer, and Reformed than that of the UCCF – but that seems to go largely unnoticed.) The problems that ensue from this are manifold. If we reject our confessional tradition, we set ourselves an almighty task, one that we cannot hope to fulfil: to reinvent the wheel of orthodoxy each generation. Ironically, this makes us less biblical, since the efforts of scriptural exegesis become so insurmountable that we can only ever touch the tip of the iceberg, and leave ourselves blindly falling into the theological mistakes of our forebears. But it also leaves each individual Christian with an fearsome task. Churches that ‘just teach the Bible’, that reject more holistic theological systems and replace them with the common ground of evangelicalism (which is far broader than we like to admit), leave their flock figuring out basic matters of faith and practice on their own. Do I baptise my children? How do the old and new covenants relate? How ought church discipline to be practiced? What actually happens in the Lord’s supper? What on earth is the millennium? For whom did Christ die? The lists goes on. And it forms a burden that is too great for any one person to bear.
The para-church, in declaring itself ‘not a church’, in effect made itself a secular entity. That is one reason for the rapid desacralisation of our worship. The rather erroneous idea, most common in British and Australian evangelicalism, that worship is not a thing we do, and thus that – as one prominent evangelical put it a number of years ago – ‘we do not go to church to worship God’ – not only goes against the grain of catholic belief, but is only conceivable within the desacralised world that secularism has given us. It is, in my view, a position that flies in the face of scripture, historic orthodoxy, and theological common sense. And at least in part it comes from the triumph of the para-church. Many para-churches do things that look an awful lot like church. They gather to praise God in song, to pray, and to hear the Word preached. More conservative organisations only allow men to do this. One summer camp I did even used Prayerbook liturgy for its ‘meeting’ on a Sunday morning. Except, of course, it is ‘not a church’. And if they were to acknowledge that such practice is, after all, public worship, and this ought to be measured and controlled in the way that public worship ought to be, then it would be to admit that this whole idea of the ‘para-church’ has become something of a façade.
The result is all too low a view of the local church and its worship. How many of us can actually identify with the psalmist, whose panting after God was sated only by beholding the Lord in his sanctuary (Ps. 63)? Or how many of us can genuinely declare with the sons of Korah that ‘a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere’ (Ps. 84:10)? The saints of old longed after the worship of the living God. They trudged along many dusty miles to behold the glory of the Lord in the Temple.
But now, gloriously, the Temple of the Lord has become accessible to all. No longer do we worship in a particular place. Now, the temple of the living God is any place where his people gather to worship him. It is, indeed, the local church. The old covenant saints longed to worship the Lord, and their longing was satisfied by the statutes of Temple worship. But these were just types and shadows, whose fullness is realised in Christ and his priesthood. New covenant worship may be barer and simpler, but the simple focus upon Christ revealed in word and sacrament is more glorious than golden pomegranates and the unfurled wings of cherubim. Indeed, when we worship, we are joined by living angels, by innumerable angels in festal gathering.
We don’t need more para-churches. We need more ordinary, bog-standard churches. Churches where broken, redeemed sinners gather Lord’s day by Lord’s day to worship him according to his word, to feed upon Christ in word and sacrament and so be renewed for another week of serving our Lord in the humdrum and battles of a dark and beautiful world. And that is how this world will be renewed. Not by flashy podcasts and massive gatherings: but one lowly, unimpressive, and yet unimaginably glorious church at a time.
The Fourth Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 