Life with God in the kingdom-colony
The people the church is sent to be
When we’re fooling around doing business-as-usual Christianity in America, a handful of operative ecclesiologies (theories of church) are in play. The church as social club. Or therapeutic community. Or cultural heritage center. Or community development organization. Or the Republican — or Democratic — Party at prayer. Or the cult of the preacher (make-it-big evangelical), or the doctrine (typically Lutheran/Presbyterian, plus Thomist Roman), or the liturgy (Anglican), or the experience (Hillsong), or even the saints (Orthodox/Roman/some Anglican, plus many Lutherans with respect to Luther himself).
Your missiology flows out of your operative ecclesiology. What you think you should be about is a function of who you think you are. Agere sequitur esse. If you want good fruit, you have to find a good tree: or become one. If the tree is bad, the consequences for mission are disastrous:
If in reality Club St you-name-it is what your church is, then mission = attracting more wealthy and beautiful people to join the club.
If you’re a therapeutic community, mission = soothing, validating, affirming, enhancing, and if possible realizing the individual self.
If you’re a cultural heritage center you teach suburban people Swedish (say).
If you’re a community development organization, mission means working for justice and peace in the neighborhood (not a bad idea).
The Party at Prayer — see above, social-club ecclesiology
If your church revolves around your pastor, mission = telling people about how great he is and working to retain visitors who “connect” with him.
If your church revolves around your doctrine, mission = talking about it, refining it, sometimes protecting it, and figuring out ways to transfer it from the heads of generation 1 to the heads of generation 2.
If your church revolves around your liturgy, mission = doing it splendidly and waiting for people to come and see how splendid it is for themselves.
If your church is a cult of experience — worship experience, conversion experience, deciding to get born again, speaking in tongues, the inner light, the inner voice, what you just feel in your heart must be true about God, empathy, brokenness, etc. — then mission = curating, perpetuating, and perhaps sharing your preferred experience (but only if this doesn’t detract from your own personal experience of the experience, which is what matters most).
If your church revolves around the cult of the saints — you probably aren’t reading this substack, so never mind.
I could probably go on, but it’s time to stop fooling around.
The church of the apostles
What we’re looking for, praying for, refusing-to-stop-hoping-for, is the apostolic church we read about in Acts. Not because it was perfect; far from it. In Acts we hear about the same gossiping, in-fighting, false doctrine, posturing, and partiality that’s marred the common life and tarnished the public witness of the church ever since. Rather what’s unique — and paradigmatic — about the church as portrayed in Luke’s second volume is the sheer immediacy, presence, and power of Messiah’s victory and rule in every aspect of her worship, life together, and mission. And that, at bottom, is what the church of the apostles simply was — is: the “place” and people among whom the saving power and gracious rule of Jesus the King is breaking into this old dying world through his Spirit-charged Word and sacraments. The Kingdom of God! The Kingdom of the Age to Come. Not yet in its visible fulness, but nevertheless really real, present, accessible, and transformative in and through the pilgrim people of God.
Run through the list of play-church options with this in mind, and you’ll see that most of them get part of it right. The trouble, usually, is myopic fixation on one aspect of ecclesial reality to the expense of the others. That good element undergoes hypertrophy, while the others wither and die.
The kingdom-church is not a social club, but it is a people and family with thick ties where lonely sinners find they really belong.
Nor is it a therapeutic community in the post/modern, selfish sense: though it is certainly a community of healing (therapeia) in the Spirit through the wounds of Jesus, the love of his body, and above all the love of his Father and ours.
No one race or culture will be privileged here; but every tribe, tongue, people and nation will contribute to the wealth of its global and genuinely catholic culture.
The pilgrim church is indeed called to seek the peace and pray for the welfare of the earthly cities, neighborhoods and nations among whom she sojourns; in the long run, we bring not only community but civilizational development.
And therefore, the church is also concerned to bear faithful political witness to the gospel of the King and the reality of his coming Kingdom: but just so, she will never be aligned entirely with a single political program, platform, or party.
It is impossible for the apostolic church to be a cult of the pastor, because heart and soul she belongs to Jesus Christ alone. However, in the kingdom-people the King’s officers, stewards, and slaves are held in honor and rightly loved.
God is adored there, not the doctrine: and yet the teaching of the apostles is the ever-present theme of her preaching, teaching, conversation, and life.
God is adored there, not the liturgy: and just so, the liturgical worship of the church is rich, vibrant, full of life; the supposed tension between the “order” of Word and sacrament and the “freedom” of the Spirit is unknown.
The apostolic church is the church of the living God, worshipping the risen King, invigorated by the Spirit of life. So while she does not worship experience — or even seek it for its own sake — she is certainly not afraid of it either. For the church of the apostles is the church in communion with the God who is not dead but alive. “And indeed our communion/fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn 1.3). “God is faithful, by whom you have been called into the communion of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor 1.9). “You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thess 1.9).
The triumphs of St Stephen and James are celebrated with awe; the living church knows herself to be surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses; she strives in the Spirit to imitate the saints: but without forgetting that she is an army at war, not a history museum, that the Christ in them is the Christ in us, and that the glory is therefore Christ’s alone.
I left the missiology out of those ecclesiological fragments; my aim is to get to them in the next couple posts. What I want to do briefly here is flesh out the kind of people the church is sent to be. Granted that the church is the kingdom-people of God in exile — indeed: the beachhead of the Kingdom invading this world to set it free by filling it with the life of the age to come — what does this new life involve? What’s it like inside these outposts and colonies of the empire of God?
The Lord — he is God!
Best place to start is the just-quoted verse from the apostle’s first letter to the little flock in Thessalonica: “They themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess 1.9-10). In the first place, the church is the people who have renounced the gods and turned in faith, fear and love to the one true God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And who continue this renouncing and turning day by day, week by week, until the return of the King.
Idolatry is the defining mark of our fallen race. In Adam and Eve and ever since, we have “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rm 1.25). In the past, we personified the objects of our disordered desires into deities like Mammon, Baal or Ishtar. Vast versions of us, projected onto infinity. In the present, we skip this step and plunge headlong into worshiping money, power, status, sex. Either way — with or without the smokescreen of a “god” — we can’t help but live, long for, and fear some-thing of ultimate value, some-thing of transcendent, sacred worth, some-thing the possession of which would deliver the goods at last. And that thing is our god.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
The late David Foster Wallace perceived not only the inescapability of worship but its potential to destroy us — to eat us alive. His diagnosis of our condition is spot on, though sadly he could only gesture vaguely to the remedy and never did embrace it — embrace Him, that is. Allah, the Mother-earth goddess, the Noble Truths, ethical principles, 12 Rules for Life, are themselves part of the problem. Only the living and true God of Israel (Yahweh) and his incarnate Son Jesus the Messiah (J.C.) can save us from destruction. He alone is worthy of all praise. Everything else really will eat you up alive. Whereas the real God gives himself to us to eat, dying that we may live: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (Jn 6.51).
So “church” names a colony of doxology in which once-enslaved idolaters gather to hear the good news of the King’s victory (gospel), to keep fighting against the grip of the old gods (repentance), to give praise to the Savior-King and his Father in the Spirit (gloria), and to eat the life-giving flesh and purifying blood of our God (Eucharist). For we have been baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Mt 28.19), and all our praise is of Him.
More simply put: “church” names that part of the human race which — having been washed and renewed in baptism — is gathered by the Spirit to hear the Word of God, feast upon the Lamb, and rejoice in the Father. Not once and for all but once and again, and again, and again. Power is not God. Money is not God. Sex is not God. The Modern Self — my modern self — is not God. “The LORD, he is God! The LORD, he is God!” (1 Kgs 18.39). So back to this water, which makes us clean. Back to the truth that cuts like a knife and the promise that sets us free. Back to the bread that fills our hearts, the wine that gladdens our souls.
If that sounds like CA 7, good. The church is the gathering of saints, in which the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments rightly administered. I’m not trying to say anything new here. We just need to recover the doxological orientation of our Word-and-Sacrament ecclesiology and to celebrate the presence of the Kingdom of God in our midst through baptism, preaching, and Supper. Eschatologized Lutheranism in the Spirit, delivering sinners and making them new.
The new way to be human
So the first mission of the church is to be the church, to wit: an assembly of idol-fighters and God-worshippers gathered by the Spirit into the kingdom of the beloved Son through his Word and sacraments.
Just so, the church is the human race made new in the Last Adam out of the ruins of the old.
Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. In the ancient revolt, Adam turned away from this chief end, and replaced God Most High with — himself. His relationship with his Maker was shattered; but by the same stroke, so was his bearing toward everything else. On the far side of Eden, in the empire of the self, life for his children — for all its transient splendors — is ultimately as nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes thought. With the heart “curved in upon itself,” as Luther said, or dominated by the will to dominate, as Augustine and later Nietzsche said, or “desperately wicked,” as Jeremiah put it, things for us are far from the shalom given our first parents in the garden. Our existential-vertical is collapsed into the pit of self through idolatry; our horizontal orientation toward our human fellows is wreaked through the injustices we inflict on others and the injustices we suffer ourselves. And the more we try, in our own wisdom and willpower, to set things right, the higher the body-count that results.
Men have forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.
Solzhenitsyn was referring to the Soviet Union when he wrote that line, but its global application is equally true. Man-in-Adam has forgotten God, replaced him with images of his own self, and — when given the chance — gladly destroyed anyone who gets in the way of his ambition for a kingdom, power, and glory of his own.
But: “If anyone is in Christ — new creation! The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor 5.17). Man-in-Messiah is another matter entirely, sort of. We’re still in the flesh, with the old propensities, lusts, hatreds, etc. churning inside us. But that is the old that has already passed away, drowned in the waters of baptism. Jesus the true and Last Man — the Eschatological Adam — has ransomed us from the powers of darkness and death and begun to make us new. Not “new” as in a new-build house, but “new” as in a renovation project less daring builders had condemned.
He is in the business of restoring fallen mankind to his true end: the worship of his Maker, and infinite joy in union with Him. By the same stroke, he is in the business of restoring fallen mankind to the high justice of love for his neighbor, and deep joy in rich friendships. “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning … At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining” (1 Jn 2.7f). This new/old way of renovation in the Spirit — the way of true worship and real justice, of love for God and love for neighbor — is what the apostolic church is now, and ever shall be. For the church on earth is a colony of the heavenly city of God, and “heaven is a world of love” (Jonathan Edwards).
But we aren’t there yet. We’re still on pilgrimage, unlearning the old way of being human in Adam and learning — slowly — the new way of life together in Jesus Christ. Which means that for church to be church, she must integrate aspects of the field hospital and the catechetical training program into her common life in the family of God. Field hospital, because the church is the “inn” where the man left for dead beside the Jericho-road finds healing (therapeia) in Jesus Christ. Training program, because discipleship is not so much information download for minds in an academic classroom as transformation of embodied persons-in-community in a (loving! patient!) bootcamp. And this lifelong process of “drilling” in the way of love, the ancient faith, kingdom-focused prayer, and the means of grace — the four parts of the catechism — that Luther insisted on so adamantly aims at nothing less than our ongoing baptismal renewal (renovatio) in the life of Jesus Christ.
Alright, you caught me
Readers who belong to the kingdom-outpost, cross-fit class, field hospital, and family named Messiah Lutheran have probably guessed what I’m up to here. We believe the Lord has sent us to Roanoke to be — together with the rest of the King’s church in this place — “a kingdom-people swept up into the worship, community and mission of the gospel.” That means bashing our idols and turning in repentance and faith to glorify the living and true God and begin enjoying Him forever right now (worship). That means receiving with glad hearts the gift of life together in the body of Christ — and learning to share the gift well in love (community). And that, we believe, hope, and pray, will well up into a font of kingdom-reality from which a lifegiving river will flow into Roanoke, Appalachia, and beyond (mission).
Which deo volente will form the theme of the next few posts in this series. More importantly: of the next few months, years, decades. So say your prayers, dear friends, and stay tuned …