Church Actually

Rediscovering the brilliance of God's plan

Gerard Kelly

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857212856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Church Actually is the theme of Spring Harvest 2012. Church attendance in the west has declined in recent years, but decline has been accompanied by growth in spiritual exploration, a desire for spirituality, faith, even Jesus - all without the church. Experience, history and the New Testament suggest this desire is ill-founded. It is through the church, the Bible suggests, that the Kingdom comes. How can we find a wider vision of the Kingdom and the church's role? Kelly explores four of the 'brilliant ideas' inherent in God's design of the church. God works through his people, and the church trains and equips; the church is Spirit-driven, and spiritual formation is central to God's mission; the church's task force transforms the world through acts of love and service; the church is the rainbow-clothed Bride of Christ, one global family, a reconciling model for the world.

God’s Brilliant Idea #1:

“Shine Through Them!”

The church as a prismatic people

Assembly Lines

From the start the biblical narrative asserts that God is not alone, and neither should humans be. We are relational creatures reflecting our relational creator. The call to form community arises directly and specifically from the nature of God as Trinity.¹

Key Text: Acts 19:32

The assembly was in confusion: Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there.²

Abstract

At its simplest, church is the assembly of God’s people – the collective noun of which “disciple” is the singular form. But it is much more than that. It is the focus of God’s joy; the new community made possible in Christ, in which we find out what it means to be human.

The gathering described in Acts 19 is rowdy, noisy and confusing.

A group of citizens, angry at the disruption Paul and his travelling team have brought to Ephesus, call an emergency town meeting to discuss what should be done. Passers-by are drawn into the crowd. Tempers flare and temperatures rise.

In the end, fearing a riot, the town clerk dismisses the assembly and disperses the crowd. And the word that is used throughout the passage to describe the assembly is ekklesia – later adopted as the New Testament’s most common word for “church”. Like citizens coming together to discuss their concerns for their city, an ekklesia is a gathering of people who share a particular identity and unite around common concerns.

The base word for church in the New Testament is, in effect, “assembly”. At its simplest level, before history added layers of hierarchy, varieties of denominations and the unbearable weight of a million expectations, “church” meant in essence “Christians together”. It is the collective noun of the singular “disciple”. To acknowledge the simplicity of this definition does not mean that we are calling into question all that history has added – much of this is good and valuable. But it does mean acknowledging that at its heart the church is a simple construct. It is what happens when believers journey together. I am a disciple of Christ. We are the church of Christ. Before it is about anything else, the church is about people.

Buried in the simplicity of this construct is a calling of immense depth. God calls us to respond to his love and grace not only as individuals, but as part of a body. For the evangelists of the New Testament, “coming to faith” and “joining the church” were synonymous. Baptism was the symbol both of personal salvation and of initiation into the community of faith. There was no discipleship that did not have a collective and corporate expression. The “I” of faith confession was linked to the “we” of credal unity. Believing and belonging were the two indivisible sides of the one coin of faith.

This sense of corporate or collective identity was immediately apparent to the first Jewish Christians, because they knew that ekklesia was also used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to describe the congregation or assembly of the Hebrew slaves as they crossed the desert.³ The church is the people of God, drawn together in the shared experience of liberation, journeying towards the shared inheritance of the promised land. As Israel is the people of God in the desert, so the church is the people of God in the world today. Whether our experience is of exodus or of exile, we are God’s people and he journeys with us.

It is this common purpose that gives us common cause, and draws us into commitment. If you stand at a bus stop early in the morning, there is little or no pressure to talk to your fellow-travellers. There is no certainty that they will catch the same bus as you, and even if they do they will take a different seat, read a different book and in all likelihood get off at a different stop. They may even wear white ear-phones to let you know of their need for isolation. But if you are waiting for a bus that will take you to a sports match, and those at the stop are your fellow team-members, and the outcome of the match will decide if your club gets promoted or not… you can bet that you will talk to each other. You have a shared goal, a task to perform, and being in relationship is a big part of performing it well.

The second bus stop is a better image of the church than the first, even though those at it may seem like strangers to us. Strangers or not, we have shared goals, and a task to fulfil. We are called, together, to build a community that touches the world. We are carriers of a message and a mandate that has life-changing implications. And step one of the instructions left to us is “talk to each other”.

The corporate and collective nature of God’s plan means that we are called to this model whether it appeals to us or not. To be an authentic follower of Christ in the world, I must at some level come to terms with others who have made the same choice. I am called not only to follow but to find fellow followers. For some this is a challenge, because their experience of church is a little too literally like the Acts 19 ekklesia, where some shout one thing, some another, and most of the people don’t even know why they are there. They see dullness and disunity, strife and small-mindedness, and they say, “No, thank you.” They wonder, “Can’t I follow Christ alone?” Such a question would have been strange to the ears of a New Testament Christian, because the statement “I want to believe” carried within itself the statement “I want to belong”. To be born into faith was to be born into family, into community. But we struggle today because we have separated the notion of believing – a private and personal decision – from that of belonging – a separate and optional choice.

Can we recover the corporate and collective dimension of our faith-confession? Can we look at our fellow-believers not simply as other people who happen to be at the same bus stop as us, but as our team-mates, people we are called to work and play with, whose interactions with us may just make the difference between winning and losing? Recovering a sense of the corporate and collective call of the church, rediscovering reasons to journey together, is vital to the re-imagining of faith in the twenty-first century. If we let individual achievement – my gifts; my goals; my glory – take the place of a shared, united and jointly held vision, we will have lost a vital element of New Testament faith. We will be thin where we should be robust; weak where we should be strong; impoverished where we should be rich. In the theology of the Orthodox churches, we would in this situation be less than fully human: ekklesia does not simply gather us, it completes us. The Orthodox theologian Zizioulas describes this as “the ecclesiological significance of the person”, and distinguishes it from “our merely biological existence in which we exist as disconnected individuals”. For Zizioulas, the belonging the church makes possible substantially adds to our existence as individuals. “In the church we are made persons; persons in communion. Through baptism and faith, biological existence gives way to existence in koinonia.”⁴

The church, then, is not simply an accident of mission, nor a mere function of faith. It is the expression of the new humanity made possible in Christ; the revealing of the new human community to which all are offered access. If we are to recover a full-colour picture of God’s plans for the world, we’re going to need to fall in love again with his brilliant idea, the church.

Think About It: Restore

In 2010 a group of us worked together on a Europe-wide project called “Restore”.⁵ A call to the people of God to pray for the continent of Europe, Restore took a programme of worship, poetry and prayer to four ancient churches across Europe – three of them cathedrals – in Lincoln, Lisieux, Florence and Prague. Standing in the echoing emptiness of these fortresses of faith, we dared to believe that among the ruins of a religion in decline God can rebuild his church. The call is vital, as alternative worldviews threaten to engulf whole populations. The call is deep, as a faith buried in the centuries of Europe’s history seeks to find its voice again. The call is urgent, as a new generation grow up not knowing of the treasures their parents have so thoughtlessly squandered.

This poem formed part of the evening. It is a cry to God for the restoration of his church in Europe. Can you echo its cry in your own heart?

Restore

Where our walls are broken down

Rebuild us God

Where streets are neither safe nor sound

Redeem

Rekindle

Fires of once strong praise

Resound your joys

In tone and phrase

From ancient stones of walls

Once raised for you

Where feelings fail

For want of fuel

Ignite renewal, reanimate

Where hearts won’t start

Where your call has stalled

Resuscitate, reactivate,

Reload, rewire, recreate

Re-cut us as a jewel

To catch your light

Return, Messiah King

Let these stones sing

Restore, strong son of love

Let these bones live

Rework the threads of tangled lives

Re-weave them into grace

Redress disgrace

Reassemble the dismembered

May we remember

Who we are

Repossess our peeling planet

God of rescue and repair

Renovate, regenerate

Resolve disease

Replace despair

Reconstruct, reconstitute

Recalibrate, reframe us

Reclaim us God of lost and found

In love re-ground

In grace rename us

Return, Messiah King

Let these stones sing

Restore, strong son of love

Let these bones live

Rework the threads of tangled lives

Re-weave them into grace

Redress disgrace

Reassemble the dismembered

May we remember

Who we are⁶

Prismatic People

The church is not a random collection of people: it is people brought together for a purpose. God’s plan for the church is to “shine” his wisdom through all those who follow Christ. God wants to shine through people, and the process by which he does this is called “church”.¹

Key Text: Ephesians 3:10

His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.²

Abstract

It is not only in the church that God wants to shine his light, it is also through the church. The ekklesia, gathering together all those who have chosen to connect with God in Christ, becomes the “people movement” through which God chooses to make his character and wisdom known.

Paul was not the founder of the Christian church, nor was he the first of its leaders, but more than anyone he watc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: God’s Brilliant Idea
• God’s Brilliant Idea #1: “Shine Through Them!”
• God’s Brilliant Idea #2: “Give Them Power!”
• God’s Brilliant Idea #3: “Help Them Love!”
• God’s Brilliant Idea #4: “Make Them One!”
• Epilogue: The Most Brilliant Idea Ever
• Notes