Following the terrorist bombings this summer in London a website came to international attention. Its message was simple: “I am not afraid.” One would be hard pressed to find a more defiant and timely message of hope for a conflict battered world. I have begun to wonder what it might mean for our church to affirm this message too in the midst of its own conflicts.
There is a kind of holy fear, of course. George MacDonald writes: “Where it is possible that fear should exist, it is well it should exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast out by nothing less than love.” MacDonald sees fear as a kind of provisional reverence that eventually will evaporate in the presence of the purifying fire of God’s love.
Something like MacDonald’s understanding of fear suffuses the prayer for trustfulness in the Book of Common Prayer: “O Most Loving Father, who wills us to give thanks for all things, to dread nothing but the loss of thee, and to cast all our cares on thee, who cares for us; Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, and grant that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which thou hast manifested unto us in thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” As a pastor I have prayed this prayer beside many hospital beds and at many gravesides, and more and more often I feel that we need to pray this prayer before the various meetings of our church.
Whether we are talking about the challenges presented by cultural changes or by conflicts within our churches and in the world beyond the stained glass, fear and anxiety have become the emotional subtexts in so many of our church’s conversations. Part of me suspects that something about this contemporary climate of fear is unique to this moment in history, something related, perhaps, to the rapidity of change and the intensity of the pressures placed upon us by changing technologies. But part of me suspects too that fear has always been with us. One cannot read the New Testament without sensing the threats surrounding the fledgling church anymore than one can read Irenaeus, Augustine, and Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Calvin, Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer without sensing the danger in the air.
I wonder, then, what ought we to fear, and what ought we not fear?
This is a theological question. It requires a theological answer. And it is a question that has been much on my mind in recent days as I have read the draft report of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. I was struck, reading this report, at how hard the members of the task force worked to allow their reverence for God to sustain their respect for one another, even when they differed. Their work gives me hope for the future of our church.
Their work also reminds us that there are some things we should fear: the demonic power of anxiety itself, especially anxiety over our institutional survival; the party divisions in the church that so easily lead to schism; and the loss of a mission for the church that is grounded in God’s own loving, creative and redemptive mission to the world.
We have nothing to fear but anxiety itself. Perhaps no word better characterizes contemporary society than the word “anxiety.” Certainly no word better characterizes contemporary ecclesiastical society, especially anxiety over the survival of the church. This anxiety sometimes drives congregations and their leaders to embrace even the most questionable schemes of mass marketing and popular entertainment simply to fill the pews. Yet, the motto “the ends justify the means” is as dangerous a policy in church growth as it is in Christian ethics.
“The church must change or die!” announces a slick consultant. And so the church cashes in on the flawed syllogism of chronic anxiety:
We must do SOMETHING!
This is SOMETHING!
Therefore we must do it!
Anxiety makes a poor counselor. Anxiety tempts us to think that we can gain the whole world and lose only a little of our souls here and there. So we run from a preeminent truth of the Christian faith: We were never called to survive. We were called to follow Jesus Christ. We were never guaranteed security. All we were ever guaranteed by Jesus is a cross like his.
I am not an idealist. I am not saying that real dangers and threats do not await the church. Nor would I want us to excuse poor leadership, dull worship and bad preaching in the name of faithfulness. All three are sins of sloth. But I am saying that there are worst fates than death, at least according to Jesus Christ. We are called to life abundant, risen life, not to mere institutional survival.
The Presbyterian Church is remarkably and wonderfully flexible. As John Calvin himself attested, many things are not essential to our faith, which we may change without the least threat to that core of theological integrity and distinctiveness that have made the various Reformed traditions such lively streams within the larger Church. These streams have consistently affirmed that the life of the mind is crucial to the service of God, that intellectual curiosity, knowledge and discovery are friends and not enemies of faith. But we should be mindful of our motives, and we must be aware not only of who we are, but of whose we are. “We belong, body and soul, in life and in death, not to ourselves, but to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.” Our responses to contemporary society, whether in worship, theology or evangelism, should be shaped by our allegiance to the Word of God and not to the passing fads of culture.
Can we imagine, for example, announcing in word and deed the gospel of Jesus Christ to a culture enthralled by consumerism? Can we imagine proclaiming the good news that people are neither merely consumers nor commodities? This is a challenge worthy of our church’s energy. But it will be very difficult for the church to proclaim this gospel convincingly, if it too gives into the temptation to package itself as just another product, or if we are unwilling to question the church’s own tendency to buy into the myths of privilege, wealth, acquisition, worldly power and prestige.
Can we imagine a church that is attractive to others because it does not desperately need them for its institutional survival? The church courageous is always more winsome than a church hell-bent on self-preservation. The fellow who recently told me we must “save” the church was dead wrong. The church already has a Savior.
The most counter-cultural sermon the church can preach is on the text: “Perfect love casts out fear.”
Indeed, I would go a step further. To proclaim that the church is the body of Christ whose peace, unity, and purity, whose faith, hope and love lie utterly and wholly in Jesus Christ, is not only the most counter-cultural confession we can make about the church, but in the church.
It is generally considered a matter of common sense that the church is simply a voluntary religious association of like-minded individuals. Our culture — and, indeed, most people in our church now — overwhelmingly agree with this view, a view inherited directly, and uncritically, from John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher who defined the church as “a voluntary society of [persons], joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshiping of God.”
The problem with this view is that it inadequately reflects the truth of the church as expressed in the Bible. The Bible expresses the character of the church through St. Paul’s beautiful conception of the Body of Christ, in which the church is understood principally as a spiritual and theological reality with social and historical dimensions, rather than vice versa.
We belong to the Church, the Body of Christ, by virtue of God’s actions through the power of God’s Word and God’s Spirit. Members don’t just join the body; they are formed by Word and Spirit in the Church’s womb: different members with different gifts, different talents, perspectives, roles and callings, toes and fingers, eyes and ears and noses, hearts and lungs. This is why the Bible speaks of our belonging to Christ using organic terms, such as a life-channeling vine with many branches, or as a family. A tree branch does not join a trunk, it grows from it. One does not choose one’s relatives. They are givens: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, crazy aunts and embarrassing uncles. The Bible never conceives of the church as a religious society, or a social club.
When we speak of the church we are speaking of a mystery both divine and human. Belonging to the Body of Christ is a matter of grace, unmerited favor, unlimited in scope, unconditional in calling. It is not a matter of like-mindedness, of identical values, interests, even (to some degree) beliefs.
Paul Woodruff, in his moving study, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford, 2001), writes: “If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs. Pray instead that all may be reverent.” His comments remind us that it is Christ who calls us together, and not we who call ourselves. Jesus called his followers from opposing forces in his society, and introduced them to an order of common life that did not depend upon their commonalities, but upon his calling alone. William Willimon famously put it this way: “God’s idea of church is a party with people you wouldn’t be caught dead with on a Saturday night.”
The fragility of our church today, our tendency to split along various partisan lines, is at least in part traceable to the fundamental theological misconception regarding the nature of the church, the mistaken idea that the church is a voluntary association of the like-minded. Such a church is subject to shatter along every hairline crack because it believes that peace and unity depend on agreement. In fact, the Church’s unity has never resided in itself. We are not one because we agree. We are one in Christ [period]. Our unity is a spiritual and theological reality. Jesus Christ is our peace. Jesus Christ, who has faith for us, is our only purity. As my old professor, the late James Torrance often reminded us, this reality of grace has priority even over the discipline of the Church. Our hope for the future lies in recognizing the practical force of this spiritual and theological reality of the Church as the Body of Christ. As C. S. Lewis once observed, the Church is that Body “in which all members however different … must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences.”
God’s mission defines the Church’s mission. In the midst of ecclesiastical controversies over property claims, denominational structures, shrinking financial resources, theological issues, human sexuality, ordination, and a variety of more and less significant issues, mixed generously with inter-tribal and regional rivalries and old-fashioned hubris, we have too often failed to inspire and instruct, or to comfort and challenge the world around us.
- We have converted stewardship (the right use of all aspects of God’s creation) into fund raising.
- We have converted evangelism (the joyful announcement of God’s grace) into recruitment.
- We have converted justice (the distribution among all persons of God’s love) into a divisive political end in itself.
Our pastors fall exhausted on the treadmills of insecurity and isolation, sacrificing their humanity and their creativity on the altars of professionalism and cultural relevance. We need to recapture a vision of God’s mission in and for and to the world like that so beautifully expressed by George MacLeod fifty years ago: Our calling as followers of Jesus Christ and the mission of the Church to which we belong is “to be to others what Christ has become for us.”
How easily we forget that Christ did not come to secure the social prerogatives of the Church but to reconcile, redeem and restore God’s creation to the wholeness for which God created it. How easily we forget that the whole point of our ministry is the transformation of persons into the human likeness of Jesus Christ, whose life of obedience to God culminated in suffering and dying on the cross. God placed God’s stamp of approval of this human life by raising Christ from the dead. For this life, and death, and resurrection we were created. To this mission we are called.
I am more convinced today than ever I have been that there are people all around us yearning to live deep, true lives, lives richly endowed with a meaning that transcends us because its source is none other than the God who created and sustains us. They look here, and see a church rife with the same sordid contention and divisiveness they find on cable television, and say, “There must be something different.” They look there, and see a church dedicated to the trivialization of its most holy mysteries, hawking its wares like a medieval seller of indulgences, and say, “There must be something more.” They know in their hearts that God matters, that God alone can fill the emptiness in their lives. When they look at us, I wonder, what do they see?
People are not consumers. People are not percentage points on a demographic chart. People are not prospects to be cultivated or giving units to be tallied. People are God’s own creatures, created in the image of the triune God, God’s own children, for whom Christ came into the world, suffered, died, and was raised again. People deserve to be taken more seriously by us than they sometimes take themselves.
Our calling as a church, our vocation and mission is to do no less. If we have courage enough to fear the right things, we can embrace this future.
Michael Jinkins serves as Academic Dean and Professor of Pastoral Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas. He is the author of several books. Michael is a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and served as a pastor for many years prior to joining Austin‘s faculty in 1993.
