The New Testament word is ekklesia - a public gathering, assembly, meeting. It never refers to a building, but rather to people. Ekklesia, etymologically, signified a 'called-out people', but there is no hint of this connotation in the New Testament. Its rough equivalent there is with the Hebrew gahal, the people of God assembled to worship him. Thus the New Testament church is not a 'sect', separating itself from the world, but a people of God gathering to and for the Lord, worshipping him, fellowshipping together, being formed into Christ, and serving the world.
Ekklesia occurs only twice in the gospels (Matthew 16:18, 18:17), once to refer to the Church of Christ, the other the Jewish synagogue. However, these two passages do not exhaust the teaching of Jesus about the church. Note, for example his calling of the disciples to comprise his 'little flock' to which the Kingdom is given (Luke 12:32, Matthew 26:31, John 10:1-18); to signify this new community of the Messiah, Jesus, uses the image of the temple (Mark 13:2, 14:58). The new temple which he will build is "the community of those who believe in him who is the agent by whom God manifested his presence among us". (1) Of the remaining 110 times ekklesia appears in the New Testament, most occur in Paul, the Acts, and the Revelation. It can designate a house fellowship (Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19, Philemon 2, Colossians 4:15) a local church (eg in Syrian Antioch, Acts 13:1, 14:27,15:3; Ephesus, Acts 20:17,28); the mother church in Jerusalem (Acts 5:11, 8:1, 11:22, 12:1,5, 15:4,22); groups of churches(Judaea, Galilee, Samaria, Acts 9:31, Syria and Cilicia, Acts 15:41, 16:5) or the universal church (Acts 20:28, 1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 1:22). So 'church' in the New Testament denotes an assembly of persons summoned for a particular purpose; a community of believers gathered from the inhabitants of a specific area; a community gathered by God through Christ; and the eschatological people of God. (2)
Recent New Testament scholarship has helped clarify the relationship between local churches and the universal church. The local church is essentially a microcosm of the church universal, but no single body of believers may designate itself as the church (ie the total church). (3) The Arndt-Gingrich Lexicon notes that 'the local as well as the universal church is more specifically called ekklesia tou theou (the Church of God) or ekklesia tou christou (The church of Christ). This is essentially Pauline usage, and it serves to give the current Greek term its Christian colouring and thereby its specific meaning. (4)
The New Testament offers many images of the church. In fact, the word meant different things to different biblical writers (and still may mean several things - even to the same person!). In the appendix of Images of the Church in the New Testament, Paul Minnear lists 96 analogies which he classifies as (1) minor images, (2) the people of God, (3) the new creation, (4) the fellowship in faith, and (5) the body of Christ.(5)
The Church Today
How do we define 'church' in the world of the 1980s and 90s? For Cyprian 'where the bishop is, there is the church' and 'he cannot have God for his Father who does not have the church for his mother'. (6) Medieval churchmen developed a dualistic notion of the 'visible' and 'invisible' churches. The Reformers would have said, 'where scriptural doctrine is adhered to, there is the church'. (7) The Anabaptists: 'where converted believers are gathered, there is the church.' Pietists organized 'little churches within the church' (ecclesiola in ecclesia) for Bible study, fellowship and prayer. (8) Modern sects tell us the 'church' is an impediment ot the effective preaching of the gospel, hence their preachments against 'churchianity'. For many of them, there is no salvation outside their particular group (and as the number of Christian denominations has increased in this century from about 1,000 to 22,000 that's pretty confusing to many non-Christians).
The Real and the Existent
C.S. Lewis's Devil describes the church visible: 'one of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection of the new building estate., When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he goes to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours who he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like 'the Body of Christ' and the actual faces in the next pew'. (9)
The Church, says William Willimon, has smug hypocrites both inside and outside. 'There is an arrogance and pharisaical self-righteousness among the churches and among the unchurched as well ... As David H.C. Read has suggested, today's new hypocrites may not be like the smug churchgoing Pharisee in Jesus' story who stood apart from the penitent publican ... Today's hypocrites are more likely to be those smug publicans outside the church who pray 'God, I may not be the best person in the world, but at least I am better than all those religious hypocrites in the church'.' (10)
So our thinking has to grapple with what Richard Newhaus calls the 'real' church (what we ought to be) and the 'existent' church (what we are). 'The Bride of Christ mentioned in Revelation 21 will be something quite new to our eyes, but she will be no stranger, for we will recognize her as the whore of Christendom transformed. It is only by trusting that promise that we dare to call the whore of Christendom the Bride of Christ. We do so in hope, and that hope is the foundation of our ministry ... The trouble with our distinctions between the church of faith and the church of fact, between the visible church and the invisible church, is that we permit distinctions to become separations ... It is easy to think that we love an abstract, spiritualized, de-historicized church, just asit is easy to love abstract, spiritualized, de-historicized people. In truth, to love abstractions is not to love at all; it is but a sentimental attachment to our own shimsies'. (11)
W.A. Visser 't Hooft, in his The Renewal of the Church states his view of the Protestant tradition. We acknowledge in faith the existence within the church of a true body of Christ into which we have been received and by which we are sustained in the Christian life. 'This body of Christ need not and cannot be renewed' (emphasis mine). (12)
The real church is the one Christ loved and for which he gave his life. If he loved us while we were yet sinners, so we should love one another. Bonhoeffer reminds us that the one 'who loves a dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter', and then follows with his devastating injunction to pastors never to complain about their congregations, 'certainly never to other people, but also not to God!' (13)
However, if we view the church too uncritically, we are not, I believe, in the true apostolic and prophetic tradition. Those early church leaders did not let their charges ' off the hook': the New Testament documents are replete with exhortations to the churches - all of them. Seward Hiltner makes the point that if (young ordained ministers) 'have no criticism of the status quo, probably ecclesiastical rigor mortis has set in'. (14) We live in the tension between the actual and the idea; rather in the 'liminal' threshold area of the ideal-hidden-and-perceived-by-faith-in-the-actual. (15) We are to be 'critical lovers' or 'loving critics' of the church, realizing that we are all falling short of the glory of God all the time, and that the church itself is glorious, not because it is perfect, but because it is being redeemed. The church is a kind of centaur: half human, half divine; half earthly, half heavenly; half flesh, half spirit; half in the world, half not of the world; half a sociological entity, half a spiritual reality. We must be critical of today's church, but we are humbly critical, and constructively critical, and prayerfully critical. And, through it all, we remind ourselves of the truth: 'Without Christ, no church'.
The New Testament churches and ours
The churches in the New Testament were not perfect, but they were dynamic. The biblical images of the church are never static: I am the vine, you are the branches (Jesus); you are the body of Christ (Paul); you are a holy nation (1 Peter) ... in order that (hina) the world may believe (in the fourth gospel); in order that you may declare (1 Peter). Karl Barth asserts 'The first congregation was a visible group, which caused a visible public uproar. If the church has not this visibility, then it is not the church'. (16) The church of today claims to be related to the opostolic church, but sometimes you would never know. In a sermon 'The Ministry of a Transfigured Church' J. H. Jowett asks: 'Is the Pentecostal morning repeated, and is the gracious miracle the talk of the town? Does the multitude come together 'greatly wondering'? What happens (when church-members come together)? Are we held in solemn and enriching amazement at the awful doings? Is there about us a mysterious impressiveness which arrests the multitude, and which sends abroad a spirit of questioning like a healthy contagion?' (17)
In his Ephesians: A Positive Affirmation Leonard Griffith has a two-paragraph delineation of the 'Christ-centred church': 'The Christ-centered church will look closely at its programs to make certain that they confront people with Christ and don't simply keep people busy. For a long time we labored under the theory that the effective church is the active church, regardless of the type of activities that takes place within its walls. We felt guilty if a cubic foot of space was not being used day and night ... The effective church of the future may have very little going on within its walls, but it may be a place of which someone can say as Zacchaeus did of his sycamore tree, 'This is where I found Christ'... The effective church may be one that spends less time discussing its policies and more time praying for Christ's guidance. It may be a church on its knees'. (18)
'All too often', wrote David Watson just before he died of cancer, 'I have attended dreary church services when I have come away spiritually more dead than alive. Any thinking person, searching for a personal faith, might well conclude that surely God was not in that place. This is a travesty of the vibrant worship that should always be there when God's people come together to praise his name. The format or liturgy of the service is not a priority for me .... but I long to be in a place where the worship is alive. The Jewish festivals in Old Testament days were full of music, singing and dancing, and we can understand why the psalmist said, 'I was glad when they said tome, "Let us go to the house of the Lord!"' (Psalm 122:1).' (19) The nature of our worship too often reveals less the joyful song of the 'new person' than the tiresome and familiar refrain of the old captivity in which nothing has been made new. (20) Wasn't it Tennyson who said something about 'the churchmen' (who) 'fain would kill their church'? A novelist began his book: 'It was twelve noon by the courthouse clock, and the church on the corner was giving up its dead.' When someone asked S. Parkes Cadman, a noted radio preacher, 'Where are the dead?' he replied, 'I don't know about all the dead, but some are on my board of deacons'. (21)
Or, in the words of T.S. Eliot:
The broad-backed hippopotamus The hippo's feeble steps may err The hippopotamus's day Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda
The church must view itself as perpetually in transition (transitus) and in need of conversion (metanoia). Advocates of renewal - certainly of revolution - within the church will always conflict with those who see any change as threatening. Jurgen Moltmann quotes the nineteenth century revivalist theologian Gottfried Menken: 'All revolutions are contrary to the kingdom of God'. And August Vilmar (1831): 'Revolution" (is) 'the monster from the abyss ... the abomination of desolation'. (23)
On the other hand, conciliar theologian Albert van den Heuvel asserts 'it is very difficult to be more revolutionary than the gospel is'. (24) And from a conservative evangelical viewpoint, in Larson's and Osborne's The Emerging Church, we find this astonishing statement: 'We are not talking about renewal. Renewal is a concept foreign to the emerging church. Renewal implies that the church was once what God intended it to be and that our task is to bring back that golden age. From its earliest beginnings until now, the church has been in the process of becoming, and it shall always be so ... We have nothing of perfection to which we may return ... Not renewal but a new thing is our concern ....' (25) This naive and dangerous write-off of all tradition presumes that God wasn't alive and active in the history of his people.
When I was in seminary in the 1960s books with titles like The Comfortable Pew, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, How to Become a Bishop Without Being Religious, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, announced a new era in the understanding of church and ministry. The post-war 'placid decade' was giving way to the turbulent Vietnam/hippie era; a Catholic became president of the U.S.; Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale reminded the faithful of values being threatened by increasingly pervasive secularism and despair; Pope John XXIII was urging the Catholic church to open its windows to the twentieth century, and relate the depositum fidei to the contemporary world; the World Council of Churches was becoming more 'political'; Carl F H Henry and other evangelicals began defining the differences between themselves and the fundamentalists; the civil rights, feminist and ecology movements were gathering momentum ...
'Renewal movements' of all kinds began talking about dismantling most of the church's cherished traditions. The radical theologians questioned orthodox notions about God, the church and the world; neo-pentecostalism introduced joy into the mainline churches' 'ho-hum' church-as-usual routine ... And there was liturgical renewal, structural renewal, church architectural renewal ... But perhaps most important of all, at least for our purposes, was the publication of Hendrick Kraemer's A Theology of the Laity, with his powerful plea that the apparatus of the church be directed towards encouraging the ordinary members of the church becoming what they are in Christ, rather than maintaining historical institutions and formulations.
But we still have a long way to go. Most of the renewal thinking has remained on the bookshelves. 'Church leaders told their younger clergy to read the renewal literature and do something with it. But the renewal of the church to which the churches had pledged themselves, and about which all synods and bishops' councils spoke, did not come. Experiments remained experiments ... And the local church, more than any other expression of the church, remained the same - a bit emptier perhaps, a bit redecorated perhaps, but it was not renewed ... The number of graduates of the theological schools who will not be ordained to the local ministry grows. The number of clergy who are queuing up for any secular job is indicative ...(26) The church has been very tentative about equipping its people to be servants in the world rather than making life better for folks in the church. (27)
The key reason, I believe, for inertia in the church is fear: fear of change, fear of growth, fear of parting with cherished traditions, fear by the leaders that their power and status will be threatened if they give more responsibility to laypeople. 'Fears do make us traitors', Shakespeare wrote. Fear and risk-taking are inimical to each other. Peter Drucker, in Landmarks of Tomorrow wrote: 'Innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than chance or of certainty. It is a new view of our role in the universe; we create order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of responsibility'. (28)
Dramatic changes are overtaking the church anyway in the last decade and a half of the twentieth century. Sociologists predict that two-thirds of Christians will live in the southern hemisphere in the year 2000. And the poor, particularly in places like Latin America, are beginning to recognize a vision for the church that is quite alien to that of the affluent West; (29) hence the recently-coined phrase 'Third Church'. (30) The call for Christians in the West is to 'take time to experience a life that is different from our lives, and to see a world that is not visible to the ordinary glance'. (31) We are witnessing in our time a strategic confluence of the streams of spirituality and justice, contemplation and praxis, even in some previously conservative corners of the church. (32)
So there is still hope. Jurgen Moltmann begin his Hope for the Church with this simple thesis: The local congregation is the future of the church. (33) That is our assumption, too, but before we look in more detail at a biblical view of the local church renewed, we must examine the notion of renewal itself.
The English word 'church' came via German and Latin from the Greek kyriakon ('that which belongs to the Lord'). Originally it was an adjective, doma or oikia, 'the Lord's house', hence its use of a building in which worship is conducted. Thus 'church' in our language derives from a post-biblical usage.
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way -
The Church can sleep and feed at once. (22)
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