Few people who have not done theological study can
accurately recount the apostolic ‘gospel’; most people can regurgitate some
churchy and religious explanation of going to heaven or hell when you die. Where did that come from? How did we get here? Why are we in this predicament? Most Australians have never heard, seen or
experienced the good news of Jesus, the gospel of Paul, the mystery of the
grace of God. Instead, what they are
most likely to hear is a churchy and religious corruption of it with strings
attached that bind people up to ideas, organisations, structures, systems and rites,
all of which have nothing in common with Jesus or Paul.
And of course, I’m a raving lunatic – at best, seriously
deluded – or so they say. Well let me
ask: since our concept of ‘church’ is nowhere to be found in the New Testament
(the word isn’t even there, let alone its ideas and rites) how do we
communicate Jesus and Paul without reference to ‘church’ and without insisting
that people should listen to and/or attend ‘church’? We cannot separate ‘church’ and religion from
our preaching, yet neither concept was present in Jesus, Paul or the first
apostles, nor was it in their preaching.
We have well and truly departed from the apostolic gospel,
the mystery of the grace of God, but that departure was well before White
Australia came into existence. I was
born in 1952, and in my lifetime, my experience of our ‘preaching the gospel’
has been, first, that I cannot remember ever hearing the apostolic message
uncorrupted by ‘church’ or religious rites or moral behavioural injunctions;
second, that when I attempt to do it (noting that I am not gifted as an
evangelist) I am mostly shunned, ridiculed or ‘counselled’; third, that a lot
of modern teaching says that the best way to ‘preach the gospel’ is to multiply
churches.
Now even if we admit the word ‘church’ into New Testament
vocabulary for the moment, the first believers had it the other way around:
‘churches’ are the product of the gospel, not the source of it. If our ‘churches’ were like the ones we see
in Acts, perhaps they could be effective in allowing the surrounding culture to
hear, see and experience the good news of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ,
the gospel of Paul, the mystery of the grace of God. Instead, our churches repeat the culture of
old Israel and then expect that the gospel of Jesus is going to emanate from
them. That is not only counter-intuitive
and counter-productive, it is rather like having the police and the military
running a family holiday resort: there are rules for everything!
But Australia did not inherit New Testament-like gatherings
and assemblies of disciples of Jesus; instead, we inherited a long-established
religious and ‘church’ history from the UK and Continental Europe, complete
with its corrupted DNA. And most of the
other stuff that has come here has come from the private-wealth, free-market
capitalism theology of the United States, with its ‘health, wealth and happiness’
dogma. The rare exception to this came
in the form of preachers on horseback arriving in this land from out of the
fires of the Wesleyan revivals in the UK, European Anabaptists escaping church
persecutions and Brethren missionaries preaching Christ without ‘church’ and
‘pastor’.
From time to time, the grace of God could be seen in
Australia in small outbreaks of sovereign, authentic Holy Spirit revival and
awakening. But the Wesleys and
Whitefield were not trying to start a new denomination, they were Anglicans; it
was their followers who turned ‘methodist fellowships’ into ‘churches’ and
denominations. The Anabaptists,
similarly, sought the freedom to be true to the apostolic preaching as they typically
saw it. The Brethren, on the one hand, wanted
no part of what they saw as unconverted Clergy presiding over their own
fiefdoms and, on the other hand, sought to bring people Christ without the
trappings of church. All tended to focus
on taking the gospel as they knew it to working-class people.
Pockets of genuine, sovereign, organic Holy Spirit awakening
did emerge. However, these never really
continued in the same vein; they all ended up as institutions or parts of
pre-existing institutions. Multiplying
churches and counting numbers of people in them came along in less than one
generation in most cases.
Where is a genuinely immigrant-Australian expression of the
good news of Jesus? Where is our “Book
of Acts”? And of course that begs the
question: where is the gospel of Jesus
in our indigenous peoples? Have they, in
fact, got something to teach us? Have we
corrupted them too – with our White European culture-religion we call church?
My contention is that Australia needs ‘revival’ (for want of
a better word). But it needs ‘revival’
that is not manufactured out of the raw materials of ‘church’ here. If I were making humans, would I use
cancerous or otherwise corrupted DNA?; only if I had a vested interest in
producing something that suited me. We
need the pure DNA of God’s eternity and a direct ‘genetic’ link to Jesus and
Paul.
Is that possible? How
do we get there? It is eminently
possible; and we get there as the first disciples did. However, we will never get there by repeating
any culture-christianity, which is what all ‘churches’ have proven to be. You cannot make a ‘church’ without
cultural-religious rites. But making
church (or rather ekklesia) is not
our business anyway. Like Paul and the
other apostles, we are to be first and foremost bond-servants of Jesus as they
were. When we are, the Holy Spirit
brings about renewal, restoration and revival; and He builds ekklesia, a ‘dwelling-place of God in
the Spirit’.
Want revival? Don’t think about church and activities and programs and the like; think about being ekklesia and living, as well as sharing and earnestly contending for, “the faith once for all handed down to the saints.” It will not happen as long as we insist on church and our religious clubs. How do I know? As a prophet, I see the elephant in the room. The elephant is called ‘church’ and, like the H & R Block advertising campaign (see still below), it’s my job to call out and point to the elephant. Whether we care enough to put the elephant out is another matter altogether.
Want revival? Don’t think about church and activities and programs and the like; think about being ekklesia and living, as well as sharing and earnestly contending for, “the faith once for all handed down to the saints.” It will not happen as long as we insist on church and our religious clubs. How do I know? As a prophet, I see the elephant in the room. The elephant is called ‘church’ and, like the H & R Block advertising campaign (see still below), it’s my job to call out and point to the elephant. Whether we care enough to put the elephant out is another matter altogether.
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