Answer Three:
Church vs Ecclesia
Another major problem is the blissful ignorance of the stark contrast
between the church as we have come to experience it and the ecclesia of God as
demonstrated, lived and taught by Jesus and the first apostles.
I have dealt with this in considerable detail in other places, so I do
not intend to go into detail here. As
William Tyndale said – and died for – the word ‘church’ is not in the New
Testament documents, so it should not be in our English translations. The church is a creation of man, while the
ecclesia is a creation of God. Church
has its origins in the temporal world, ecclesia is of spiritual, eternal,
heavenly origin. And the difference
between them is as stark as the difference between night and day, light and
darkness.
The kingdom of God is that realm or zone where God is actually taken to
be king in demonstrable reality. The
good news within that is that Jesus is to us the salvation, the redemption, the
righteousness and the justification we humans stand in need of. Our salvation is that Jesus tasted death for
everyone and his death is sufficient for us all. Our redemption is that Jesus was the price
God paid to release us from the grip of the evil one. Our righteousness is that Jesus stands
perfectly right before the Father and shares that righteousness with all who
fully trust in him. Our justification is
that Jesus has borne the punishment for our sin and we are legally pronounced
‘not guilty’ – therefore, as Paul said, “there is now no condemnation for those
who are in Christ Jesus”.
The church, being true to its origin and its nature, is far more
interested in the things of this world.
Listen to the gospel of the church and it is easy to come to the
conclusion that what matters is clean living, good behaviour, rule of law,
family first and ‘right’ politics.
Indeed, it may well have reached the point in many groups where this is
the definition of being a christian. In
general, the New Testament doesn’t even use the term christian, preferring to
describe Jesus people as disciples. And
it was disciples of Jesus who were first called ‘christians’, and in a
derogatory manner.
It is often difficult to find any point of connection between the gospel
of church and the good news of the kingdom of God that belongs to
ecclesia. Church and CEOs and religion
will inevitably give you a ‘gospel’ and an attempt at ‘evangelism’ that
emphasises those things.
However, when you see ecclesia not church, elders not CEOs, romance not
religion – evangelism (as well as pastoring, I might add) is something
fundamentally different from what we are used to. Hence my point that “preaching the gospel” is
a world apart from “heralding the good news of the kingdom of God.” And we were commissioned to do the latter,
not the former.
In ecclesia, the apostolic direction is clear and specific: apostles,
prophets, teachers, evangelists and pastors working as a circle of elders for
the growth to maturity of the whole body.
In church, we make our own rules.
Basically it comes down to a business model of a CEO or Managing
Director called a Pastor and/or a parish committee deciding what happens when
and how and by whom.
Here is yet another reason we are
not impacting the world as we expect to.
And yet still, when teachers and prophets raise these issues, it is the
teachers and prophets who are maligned and marginalised and encouraged to
either keep quiet or go somewhere else.
When I was a boy, I regularly heard a funny old saying: “Anywhere else
you can do that there, but you can’t do that there ’ere.” This seems to be the unwritten motto of
church.
Answer Four:American Culture Christianity
As we saw earlier, this phenomenon was documented by René Padilla in 1974. There is no
doubt in my mind the concept predates Padilla by many years, but it became an
issue of public concern in the mid-70s.
Padilla spoke of it in these terms at the Lausanne Congress on World
Evangelisation in 1974 (Let The Earth
Hear His Voice, World Wide Publications, Minneapolis, 1975):
No less harmful to
the cause of the Gospel than ‘secular Christianity’ is the identification of
Christianity with a culture or a cultural expression… Today … there is another form of ‘culture
Christianity’ that has come to dominate the world scene – the “American Way of
Life”.
Any serious student of history knows that “culture christianity” is not
a new phenomenon. But this is our
generation and we seem to have maintained a total disregard for the wise heads
who have tried to alert us to a serious problem and for the plain statements of
scripture that inform us that such practices have no place in ecclesia. This continuing disregard confirms to me that
we are not dealing with the ecclesia of God but with the church of man.
Padilla was speaking specifically of what he described as the
identification of christianity with the “American Way of Life” and one doesn’t
have to travel far to see how this cross-breed of christianity and the American
Way of Life has become the established and dominant religion in many places
around the world. I’ve been to village
Africa where it is often the dominant stream.
And as I said earlier, Gene Edwards encountered it in Albania soon after
the doors to that nation were flung open.
And David O Moburg in The Great
Reversal (1972) – himself a North American christian – was at pains to voice
concerns at this destructive inter-marriage.
The point about the good news of the kingdom of God in ecclesia (as
opposed to the gospel of church and institutional christianity) is that its
pioneer and founder (Jesus) and its chief first-century advocate (Paul) were
emphatic that it is beyond culture and all the nominal divisions of man and the
world. Ecclesia is ONE BODY, the Body of
Christ, not many bodies making up some mystical body. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither
male nor female, neither Paul-ists nor Apollo-ists – not even Christ-ists. In like manner, there is no human culture
that in itself embodies ecclesia or the good news of the kingdom of God.
My reading and study of the New Testament over many years suggest that a
case can be made for a single unique culture, but it is not a culture of man
into which ecclesia and the good news must fit.
Rather, the gospel of the kingdom of God, and the existence and
Spirit-led growth of the ecclesia of God, give rise to a single universal kingdom
of God culture (over and above the cultures of man) that has the capacity to
transform all human cultures. Indeed, it
is my view that that is one of the clear purposes of God carrying out His plan
in His people in His world.
And like Greg Boyd is at pains to point out, there is no such thing as a
“Christian Nation” or a “Christian Religion” as far as the kingdom of God and
the household of God are concerned. If
those things do exist, they exist in the realm of man and do not have the
imprimatur of God the Father or of His Christ or of the Holy Spirit.
The existence – even dominance – of “culture christianity”, including
American Culture Christianity, does not signal divine blessing but a human
curse. It is one of the great reasons we
are not impacting the world as we expect to.
And we cannot make things better by tweaking it – we need to repent and
abandon it altogether. We need to starve
it of the nutrients it needs to survive by withdrawing our resources from it
and pouring them instead into our unique local expression of ecclesia, the
household of God.
I am fairly certain that when we stop pedalling the old covenant story
of God (the gospel of the church) and put our time and energy into the good
news of the kingdom of God, we too will find, as Jesus said, people will be
pressing to get in. Human nature craves
religion; the human spirit unknowingly craves salvation, redemption,
righteousness and justification. When we
find out that it is available in Jesus – without the intervention of any human mediator – we find ourselves
in the presence of good news indeed.
Indeed it is the good news of the kingdom of God.
[One reason to go - that's next post]
Cheers,
Kevin.
[One reason to go - that's next post]
Cheers,
Kevin.
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