In recent years a great many Christians, disturbed by the absence of a vital witness to Christ in his churches, have prayed something to the effect, “Lord, revive thy church beginning with me.” A good intention--and a prayer that probably stimulates genuine religious sentiment among God’s people; but as it is, there lie beneath its surface some misleading assumptions about the nature of the church and the renewal it needs today.
If, as a social construct, the church of Jesus Christ is only an adventitious, incidental coming together of believers with similar persuasions, then increasing numbers of revived/converted individuals could certainly result in stronger, more lively groups. Unfortunately the great majority of Christian congregations see themselves with no more specific social mission than this; and in theory; therefore, personal conversion revivals seem to be enough to keep the machinery going year after year. But I, for one, seriously challenge the assumption that by increasing the number of fervently witnessing members (either by reviving the old or converting some new ones) a church will find renewal and approach more fully its true calling in Christ.
As I understand the New Testament vision of the church, witnessing lay people could never alone make living churches.
In fact, after several recent decades during which this sort of individual thrust as an approach to church renewal has been pursued, the church is now generally worse off (structurally, numerically, financially--even morally) than it was thirty years ago; and the surrounding world societies which it is meant to influence have been practically untouched by it. Furthermore, every pastor knows how difficult for the flock a few “turned on” persons become in an otherwise settled congregation. Speaking pastorally, radical renewal of long time members often portends troublesome times; and only rarely does a congregation have the pastoral-nurturing ministry base to bring more than a handful of new converts to maturity at once.
But there are more serious objections to the individual conversion theory of church renewal than its apparent failure. Not only does it tend toward an off-centered view of the church in relation to the world. Its biblical view of human nature and of the order of creation is dulled by an individualistic concept of sin and salvation. When Jesus taught that out of men and women’s hearts issue the thoughts which lead them to murder, lust, and immorality he was not claiming sin to be only, or even mainly, an individualistic matter. He was indicating the deeply personal source of it. Adam was involved in a human society (with Eve) before the fall, and both primal individuals and their society were afflicted by the infection of Adam’s sin: they were ashamed before one another as well as before God. Subsequently they were forgiven--restored to communion with God, according to the third chapter of Genesis; but the fourth chapter reveals that fallen Adam, though pardoned, was unable to keep his family from becoming a seedbed of jealousy and murder.
If there is a collectivist aspect to sin, there must surely be some sort of collectivist aspect to its healing. Thus we can recognize Jesus' promise to be present among two or three gathered together in his name as an assertion of the corporate dimension to personal salvation that would attend his coming kingdom. Why? Because people’s corporate involvements, sold as much under sin as their individuality, were to be countered in the kingdom age by a corporate entity, the church. Inescapably then, not only must individual men and women be redeemed, so also must the social groupings which they cannot be (and ought not to be) separated from. Reasoning thus, it seems obvious one of the fundamental tasks of the church of Jesus Christ is to become the sort of corporate entity which can effectually exert active influence on the social forces and institutions of its members' environment, not for the purpose of sanctifying existing world systems or establishing new and supposedly holy ones, nor yet to provide a hiding place from fallen society; but the church must become a specialized corporate entity in order somehow to ensure its members a social environment in which they can experience and live out the principles of God’s kingdom in terms of their everyday existence in relation to the secular order around them. If any local congregation will accept the challenge of this task, its leadership will immediately encounter the real problems of renewal that today’s church must grapple with.
Society is not just a basketful of bad apples needing to be replaced by sound ones. It is a complex of fallen interpersonal, social, and institutional forces, and no amount of individual conversions will transform it into the kingdom of God’s love. Each generation of Christians must resist the winning but wasteful theory that the church is a funnel through which converted men and women filter into the workaday world where by their witness, work and prayer they are meant slowly to transform society into something more and more like the kingdom of God. The New Testament holds no such view of the church or its mission.
Nor is the church itself simply a basketful of good apples (or good and bad, depending on one’s theology). Locally it too must be a complex network of personal/social forces because its members, though committed to common ideals, are primarily committed to one another (the new commandment). So the same forces are at work among the people of God as are in the world. But the church, under vigilant pastoral over sight, can provide its members a social context in which to experience these forces with the venom of their sting removed--because the church’s goal is not the “good” (of the individual or the group), but love; and because the church’s commitment is not self-serving, but self-sacrificing.
So the task of renewal in the church today is immense. Nothing short of revolution in lifestyle will accomplish it. Perhaps new members will join in the revolution, but more than anything else, the church needs new leadership, new structures and a renewed biblical self- image.
When this article appeared, Graham Pulkingham, former rector of Church of the Redeemer in Houston, Texas, was a contributing editor to Sojourners and one of the leaders of the Community of Celebration in Scotland, an international center for promoting church renewal.
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