In his book, Revolution, George Barna holds up the fictional example of two Christians who meet each week at the “Church of the Green” opting for golf and good conversation over church participation. Not simply reporting the obvious, Barna, declares instead that “the local church is one mechanism that can be instrumental in bringing us closer to Him and helping us be more like Him” (p. 36), charging Revolutionaries to ask themselves, “Does the mechanism provide a way of advancing my faith?” (emphasis mine)
For Mr. Barna, the local church is no more spiritually significant than taking a walk by a lake. Indeed in one section, he clearly implies that often the walk is better than attending a worship service. Which--to be honest--is an accurate statement of many of our personal experiences.
But for Barna, those personal experiences are really all that matter to the true revolutionary. (Mr. Barna makes his assertions based on some biblical arguments that I will begin to address in the next post.)
But while I believe that Mr. Barna is terribly mistaken in his understanding of the local church, it is not entirely his fault. In many ways, Mr. Barna’s approach to the church is rooted in what Emil Brunner called, “The Misunderstanding of the Church” in his book by that title written over a half century ago.
Brunner writes that regrettably the Reformers categorized the church as a “means of grace,” with the unintended result of making the church on par with every other way that God sovereignly and savingly reaches into our lives. And soon it was easy to think of the church as only a means to an end (albeit a vaunted means) and that end is God communicating his grace to each person.
I believe that unwittingly we have seen the same idea in evangelicalism when an evangelist like Billy Graham leads someone to a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and then exhorts people that the first thing to do is to find a Bible believing church that can help you “grow in your new relationship.”
In other words, the church is not necessary, but it is at least potentially helpful. On this score at least, George Barna is in good company. And frankly, he could even count the ultimate hip Christian, Bono, amongst his “revolutionaries.”
But Barna goes down a path that would make our ancestors blanch. While the Reformers and the evangelicals of the past would challenge churches to live up to their calling as a means of grace (even if in Brunner’s and my opinion that is still too lowly a calling), Barna starts with the negative. He assumes that the local church is at best “abiblical” (p. 37) and that the purpose of Jesus teachings is to make us all disciples who are able to be spiritually “self-governing” (p. 70) and even suggests that at best, real revolutionaries will only drop by churches now and then (p. 138).
For the Reformers, addressing the collectivism of the Catholic Church of the day, considering the church a “means of grace” was a way of containing the power of the hierarchy and reasserting the authority of the Word. They never would have considered that people would eventually take that to mean that the church was optional. (All of the Reformers followed Cyprian that “You can’t have God as your Father if you don’t have the Church as your mother.” And they meant actual churches, not just some mystical “Church Universal” because everyone could affirm that—but more on that next post.)
Brunner reasserts that the church, the specific fellowship of believers to which you and I are to be baptized into, nurtured at the Lord’s Supper, worship amongst, hear the proclamation of the word, and grow in grace and faithfulness is nothing more or nothing less than a replication of the fellowship of the Triune God on earth.
The fellowship of Christians is just as much an end in itself as is their fellowship with Christ. This quite unique meeting of the horizontal and the vertical is the consequence and the type of that communion which the father has with the Son “before the world was;” (John 17:5, 24) in the supernatural life of the Christian communion is completed the revelation of the Triune God...the very being of God is agape--that love which the Son brings to mankind from the Father, and it is just this love which is the essence of the fellowship of those who belong to the Ecclesia. (p. 12-13)
While I personally would love to always be considered in the same "camp" as Bono, I believe that that we would all be better off listening more to Brunner: “(The) togetherness of Christians is...not secondary or contingent: it is integral to their life just as is their abiding in Christ.” (p. 12, emphasis mine)
Next Post: Big C, Little c, C(c)hurch.
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