The Shape of the Church to Come, Part I

If today's institutional church is to be a viable force in the age to come we must anticipate not minor modifications but radical change, change in existing institutional structures which condition the nature of the church's life and also in corporate attitudes which shape its mission.

As we all know, the church as institution is not the only meaning to be conveyed by the New Testament word for church, nor is it its principal meaning. Primarily, the word has reference to a people, a community, a gathering. It means not just a lumping together of individuals, but rather a corporate phenomenon -- the people of God. It means a people with a personal and ideological identity common to themselves and to no others: a peculiar people who uniquely belong to God, and for whom this "belonging" is a reference point for making sense out of their very being.

The New Testament provides us with nothing definitive concerning outward shape or institutional forms for the church. I realize this comment flies in the face of sincere attempts presently being made to return to the New Testament church. It is an obvious historic fact that by the third generation all such attempts have produced a church looking very much like the churches they were attempting to escape from, perhaps because in the absence of a useful new model, old ones were unconsciously used in the end.

There are descriptions of many things relating to church structures, activity, and social make-up, but when everything the New Testament says about the church has been summed up, it falls short of a living sample to make a copy from. A great deal of interpretation and surmising must be added to make social sense out of the thing. The New Testament reveals basic principles concerning the internal life of the church in any age anywhere, but there are only a few meager hints at what sort of first-century garb this life was lived in. I see nowhere in its revelation a religious model for the external forms of the church as a society or social institution. Nor does the New Testament tell us that the early church itself used contemporary religions to model itself after: neither Judaism nor the Greek mystery religions finally provided the early church with a model out of which to shape its social forms and structures of life.

If I'm laboring this point, it is because I think it of utmost importance that we avoid using the New Testament to construct a religious model for changing the church's life today. The New Testament neither provides us itself with a model, nor does it point to another religious model upon which to shape and structure a social organism such as the church. We must look elsewhere for models.

Must we, then, accept the shape of the church today as a model and reform it from within?

If we did begin with the church as it is today, I fear the necessary changes would never come about. No, something more drastic is in order; just as the early Christians rejected the Jewish Church as a model, we must not be tempted to take the contemporary church as a model for our revisions.

Nor did the early church use Jesus' teachings to build a religious model for the church. He used the word "church" only once, in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew, and spoke of it then as the messianic community, the ecclesia, the assembled, called out people of God. There was not enough in Jesus' teachings that could be used as a model for a religious organization. If the Old Testament does not provide a church model (in that the New Testament sought for one elsewhere), and if the New Testament does not provide one but rather lays down principles, and if because of cultural limitations our present church experience does not provide a suitable model, and if we attempt to start with no model and our efforts eventually come to nothing, what then are we to do? What did the New Testament church use as a model? What might we use as one?

I think, in large measure, the working model for the church in every age must be a secular rather than a religious one. I do not mean that the church should imitate the secular world or that it should follow its example. I see a difference between "example" and "model." By model I mean an historic, concrete reference point. The world in which God's people live must provide them with models for the shape, structure, and forms of life. I see no other possibility for an incarnational faith.

That is how I understand the New Testament church with its claim to be God's new people. It lived self-consciously in the world, and it used the world as a reference point from which to define its life of godliness. By so doing, the church lived in prophetic judgment upon the fallen world. A passage in Acts 4 can help illustrate what I mean. This section comes just after Peter and John were severely tested by the religious authorities of their day. Having returned to the Jerusalem fellowship, they offered a prayer of thanksgiving and faith. Verse 32 says, "Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul and no one said that any of the things that he possessed were his own." I am sure the world in which the first church lived was one where every man had the right to own his own property and to take charge of his possessions. And certainly nothing in the gospel could be construed to contradict that; legally and morally speaking each Christian has the right to call what he possesses his own. However, witnessing to the power of love among his people, God led the first church to express its economic life in a way that was not the way of the world around it. The first church lived a sort of judgment on the legal and moral standard of a world in which the hungry and homeless suffer. The church in every age, when faithful to its calling to be God's people, will live out the judgment of God's Word upon that age.

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, when this article appeared as the first of three columns on “The Shape of the Church to Come.” The final two appeared in October and November 1976 Sojourners.