Church - ecclesia
Oxford Reference dictionary: Church
1. A building for public use
2. A meeting for public worship
3. The body of all Christians
The term church is the usual translation of the Greek ekklesia in the New Testament. Prior to the first century, ekklesia derived from being an assembly of people not a building. It occurs three times in the Gospel of Matthew and 112 times elsewhere in the New Testament.
Trivia: While the word ekklesia is not used in Acts 20, believers in a church like setting met with Paul on the third floor of a building to hear Paul speak. It is the only occasion mentioned in the Bible where believers gathered on a Sunday (first day of the week) to specifically hear a sermon and later break bread. The passage is five verses long and yet there is not a library big enough to contain all the books written about what to do and say in church.
In my last blog, I highlighted among other things, undone believers who are walking away from the church. The trend at least in North American has reached epidemic numbers. There really is no longer need for empirical evidence. It is plain enough for all to see. In particular younger “evangelicals” are repenting from evangelicalism, “not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. And more than that, many have concluded that the church is now a moral problem. “[1]
The issues are legion. Fallen leadership, legalism, consumeristic Christianity, domestic and spiritual abuse, exclusionary membership, race, secularism are just a few of the specifics contributing to what could be called the “Great Disillusionment” with the church.
And while many leave their church roots others are doubling down and digging trenches in the hope of preserving what they perceive is the Christian Way. It is in part what lies behind the rise of a political Christian Nationalism to make Christianity Great Again by a return to some fictional nostalgic moment in the past. However, a younger generation is not buying it. A return to what they ask. Patriarchy? Consumerism? Racism? Colonialism?
In my own experience with disenchanted Bible college students there is desire to “return” but not to return to cultural artifacts that are better left behind but rather a prophetic call back to God’s intentions for the church.
One day cornered by experts in the law, Jesus was asked, tell us which commandment in the law is greatest? Jesus said to them “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-36). Jesus was practicing a little deconstruction on his own and reaches back to an earlier memory (Deut 6:5, Lev. 19:34) Love at its finest is not only the ground of any subsequent law it continually exposes its adherents to new horizons. Love is God’s intention.
But many complain are we are making things “too complicated?” Many say, "I love clearly defined fences. I love the protection they afford me. If they were good enough for the Apostle Paul they are good enough for me? I just want to go to church, sing a few songs, pray, get an encouraging word in a sermon that largely confirms what I already believe and go home.
Among good actors I understand that sentiment. In these times we are surrounded by bad news. But at the same time, I cannot quiet in my head the sardonic prayer from the 5th volume of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, entitled Mostly Harmless. The prayer goes like this,
Lord, protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about and protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. [2]
Pray that prayer, however, and the Lord’s prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” is rendered nothing more than a fantasy.
Children with the rare disease SCID often called the “bubble boy disease,” are born without an immune system. Their bodies cannot defend themselves from all kinds of infections with the eventual result of an early death. The only known cure is a bone marrow transplant with a compatible donor. Outside of that the child must live in a literal artificial bubble.
As I reflect on my upbringing in the early 70s as a Pentecostal teenager, I did not suffer from SCID but intuitively I knew something about bubble living. I attended a Pentecostal School, went to church midweek and on Friday nights (youth), attended church three times on Sunday, morning service 11am-1pm, Sunday School 3.00-4.30, and evening service 7-9.30. While I have many fond memories of my high school (just celebrated my 50th graduation this past summer) if we played sports ,we were not allowed to play teams outside of our school. Everything was done to guard our souls from outside contamination. Did it work? 😊 What happened in high school stays in high school.
In 1975 I attended EPBC a Pentecostal Bible College. As students we often joked about living in the bubble. But in hindsight it was not a joke. College life was never designed to immunize or build up antibodies that would be necessary upon graduation. In the 70s we graduated with many good baseline truths but our Christian triumphalism was ill prepared to cope with life and its vagaries of illness, divorce, sexism, abuse, joblessness, doubt and the list goes on. Basically everything outside of the bubble.
Upon graduation (1978) I was fortunate. It wasn’t a deliberate strategy on my part. But with my first pastoral charge I pastored both an English Presbyterian and French Pentecostal church (1979-1984). At one point I was asked to baptize a child in church having never even witnessed an infant baptism. Nor did the internet exist to help me. To add to my confliction the parents were in a common law relationship and lived in a northern mining town. None of this computed with my small world. They requested that the baptism be done at their parent’s home in the town where I pastored. And other than the catholic priest I was the only pastor in town. Did I believe in baptism? Yes. Did I believe in prayer? Yes. Did I believe in the faithful witness of parents? Yes. In the end, I baptized the child, and I believe God honored my actions. My bubble was deflating rapidly. It was in the Presbyterian church where I learned about the lectionary and the church calendar. My Pentecostal upbring, included Christmas and Easter, but I knew little about Advent, Epiphany, Lent and even Pentecost Sunday was an afterthought. Five years later I left that church and attended a French Catholic University, to complete a MA and a PH.D. in theology. My tradition to that moment considered Catholics as outside of the “fold.” Catholics were clearly not “born again” or so we were told. My university experience would go on to shatter those false assumptions.[3] And today I attend a local Mennonite Brethren church in my hometown of La, Salle Manitoba.[4]
My point? My bubble was pierced a long time ago, and to my surprise I discovered on the outside that I was still in the kingdom of God but now with some much-needed antibodies – grace perhaps being one of them.
Canadian intellectual Malcolm Gladwell in his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and The Rise of Social Engineering, introduces readers to the city Popular Grove.[5]
A local real-estate developer describes the town as Working class affluent.
There’s no attached housing here. It’s all single-family homes. And I don’t know the number, but I guess well over 90 percent of homeowners reside in their homes. So, we don’t have condos. We don’t have rentals. We don’t have lower-end dwelling that attract any type of diversity. So, it has become a very homogeneous place to live, which is probably why there’s a shared value” system of good grades, good sports, go to the best college you possibly can
It was a little piece of Eden. The gossip in the hallways was all about achievement.
Popular Grove was idyllic until it wasn’t, and a suicide epidemic occurred. The first High school suicide was followed by another suicide which followed another suicide. In fact, the rate of suicide among the teens in this community is 4 times higher than the national average in the United States. What went wrong? Gladwell documents they had created a monoculture with no diversity, and the moment a student didn’t live up to the expectations of living in such a town, the pressure became unbearable.
Gladwell calls the disease monoculture. From a church perspective I could call it Bubble Culture
But as Gladwell points out epidemics love monocultures. And so do we. Sometimes, in fact, we go out of our way to create them – even though in doing so we put our own children at risk. Perhaps ironically as I write this, I just returned from receiving the seasonal flu shot and the latest Covid 19 vaccination. Vaccinations work by injecting us with a small dose of the virus to build our immunity against the harmful effects of a more hideous disease. And herein lies the dilemma of a mono/bubble culture within a church setting. In our effort to bubble wrap the individual from the harm, we risk exposing ourselves unwittingly to a host of other ills for which we have no immunity.[6]
Here is the problem, Christian students go to university, hear competing narratives, are confronted by personal illness, death of a loved one, divorce and remarriage, racism, sexual feelings and they do not have the awareness or skills to cope. In the end they often repent of the church, where repent simply means a 180 turn. They had no immunity.
For those who hold out, they might dig trenches, they might spout conspiracy theories, make up stuff, practice spiritual gymnastics, all in the face of evidence.
Reading through this one might wonder why I still stay with the church. The short answer is, in the end church is home. In my early years this would have been a nonsensible question. Thankfully I was blessed with formative pastors. The first pastor that made a lasting impression on me as a young boy was Allon Hornby and my first youth pastor was Jim Cantelon. Later as a teenager having moved to Newfoundland I had Ron Osmond and John Mercer as pastors and with my parents I was gifted with solid and loving leadership. I hang on because God called me at the age of 11 under the leadership of Pastor Hornby and I have never been able to shake that calling even during turbulent times. I hang on because the church is the best place to learn that grace is mediated. I hang on because of my Sunday School teacher, the late Mr. Sparks, beleived in the church. I hang on because of my early mentor, the late Rev. Dr. John Hammond who took me under his wing and allowed me to preach for the first time in his church. I hang on because a healthy church is filled with broken people who are just looking for home. I hang on because the church is my weekly meal, without which I couldn’t survive.
I hear the objection to a discourse such as this. In getting out of the bubble have we moved too far to the other side. Gone, are the Sunday evening services, altar calls, and mid-week services are suffering, if not eliminated. And on Sunday, parents now compete with the sporting activities of their children. These are legitimate concerns. But I prefer to look at the new opportunities. We are amid a rummage sale.[8] A door has swung open and before us is the rest of the Kingdom of God. The church remains my homebase, but I see displays of God’s hand everywhere as never before. Like many others I used to divide culture artificially between Christian and secular (read non-Christian). The former was good, and the latter was to be avoided. I learned some time ago those are not biblical classifications. They are simply different genres. The Apostle Paul wrote, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. “(Philippians 4:8). There are things under the label Christian which fail Paul’s thinking and there are things under the label secular that are very much in line with Paul’s admonition. Here I should give a shout out to Steena Holmes, a former student of mine at EPBC who with over 2 million books sold is a New York Times bestselling author of psychological thrillers. [9] Are her books Christian? The question is nonsensical. They are commendable and with eyes wide open they even hint at her own journey of faith and maybe others as well.
In my darker moments when I think maybe Christ made a mistake in calling forth the church to represent him, I go back to this prayer for the communion table that is making its rounds. I do not know the origins of this liturgy, but it stands as a refreshing reminder of what is the church.
This is the table not of the church but of the Lord
It is made for those who love him and for those who want to love him more
So come those who have much faith and those who have little
You who have been here often and you who have not been here long
You who have tried to follow and you who have failed
So come, because it is the Lord who invites you. It is his will that those who want him should meet him here. The body of Christ broken for you, The blood of Christ shed for you.
[1] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Abingdon Press 1989). As quoted by Angela Reitsma Bick and Peter Schuurman in Blessed are the Undone (New Leaf Network, 2024):14.
[2] Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (Heinemann, London): 84.
[3] Catholicism is still very real in Quebec. It could be argued that Quebec remains one of the most religious Provinces in Canada. It is not so much that Quebecers don’t believe, it is that the memory has largely been repressed and forgotten. Churches that are succeeding are finding ways of rekindling that memory.
[4] In that regard, whenever we moved, we have been fortunate to opt to attend the church closest to our home. I can walk to church. The church is in the community in which we live. For many people this is not possible or desirable, I understand that. I have resisted shopping for a church like I might shop for a car.
[5] Popular Gove is an actual town in the States. The researchers who investigated the town gave it the fictional name Popular Grove which Gladwell went with. It is not a tourist town, but it is “a perfect example of a particularly American species of a tight-knit, affluent community.”
[6] There are many ironies here. During the Covid 19 outbreak, many church folk were among those who refused vaccination at the risk of contamination. The church is not the only place guilty of promoting monoculturism. In Florida they are banning books concerning critical race theory. There is a place for age related learning. But I graduated high school knowing nothing about residential schools in Canada.
[8] Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Baker Books: 2008). Tickle makes the observation that every 500 years it seems the church goes through a significant rummage sale and cleans out its attic. She further claims that we are now in the presence of another time of reconfiguration with its inevitable pain. “It is especially important to remember that no standing form of organized Christian faith has ever been destroyed by one of our semi-millennial eruptions. Instead, each simply has lost hegemony or pride of place to the new and not-yet-organized form that was birthing.” P.27.
[9] I single out Steena in part because I like her, in part because she is a good writer, in part because I am currently reading the Sister Under the Stairs, in part because I think it is safe to say she is the top selling author of any student who graduated from my bubble Eastern Pentecostal Bible College and finally in part because there was a time when we would have been discouraged from reading her books or celebrating her success as a graduate of EPBC because the books are “non-Christian.” There might be an exception on her books about coffee and travel. https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=steena+holmes&crid=2SNR4606OT5Z2&sprefix=%2Caps%2C271&ref=nb_sb_ss_recent_1_0_recent
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