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By David Wells
This last year,
there was a brief media buzz leading up to Christmas over the fact
that many megachurches cancelled Christmas day worship services.
(What sense could a Martian have made of the fact that in America,
many Christians, on the one hand, were arguing for the freedom at
Christmas time to place religious symbols in public places while, on
the other hand, other Christians in the megachurches were closing
the doors of their churches, on Christmas day no less, closing the
doors on the most visible religious symbols in our society?!) The
reasons given for this were that Christmas day is family time, that
it was unnecessary to worship on Christmas day because many would
have been to pre-Christmas services and, further, that it would be
unnecessary because people were being supplied with videos for that
day.
Skipping church on
Christmas day is not the unforgiveable sin. Let us be clear about
that. Nevertheless, this magachurch disposition was symptomatic of
an attitude. It spoke to the fact that many people were not going to
allow the church to inconvenience them on this day. Their decision
also said something about their understanding of family—as if we
have to choose between “family time” and worship! I thought that,
from a biblical perspective, worship is what FAMILIES did together
and so it is central to “family time,” not something which
interferes with it! And this matter of videos tells us that we are
now in great danger of privatizing our faith in its entirety. If
this becomes a habit, all Christians will have to do each week is to
visit a (Christian) video store some time in the week to pick up
their sermon for that weekend and then, in the privacy of their
home, viewing it when the time is convenient. The local church would
then become entirely unnecessary!
This attitude which
diminishes the significance of being in church and which will not
tolerate any inconvenience has had a strange incarnation overseas,
if I can use that word. American missiologists like Ralph Winter
have been strenuously advocating “churchless Christianity” as a new
and exciting strategy. Their thought is that believers in other
religious contexts need not separate themselves from those contexts
but can remain in them as private believers, thereby preserving
themselves from any kind of harm. This, of course, is easier to do
in a Hindu context in which one is allowed to choose one’s own god
from among the many that are worshipped. Christians, quietly and
privately, are simply choosing to worship Jesus and ignoring the
other gods and goddesses in the temple. They are never baptized,
never make a public declaration of their faith, and never become
part of a church. This arrangement is, of course, much harder to
carry off in Islam. Nevertheless, Winter and others now estimate
that there are millions of these “churchless” believers concealed in
other religions. And is this not where American evangelicalism is
headed? In fact, there are already millions of believers concealed
in their own living rooms whose only “church” experience is what is
had from one of the television preachers. Is it really a
coincidence, then, that it is American evangelicals who are
energetically arguing for the wisdom of a comparable strategy in the
mission field in respect to their religious contexts? I think not!
Here we have an
unholy alliance between raw pragmatism, a Christianity without
doctrinal shape, one that in fact separates between having Christ as
savior and Christ as Lord (an option that the N.T. never holds out
to us!), and a lost understanding of the necessary role which the
local church should have.
If we would but
read our Bibles from the beginning, we would notice that from the
beginning there was always an inescapable corporate dimension to
believing. There were never “private” believers in Israel, nor
should there be today. The reason is that there are vital aspects of
the Christian experience which simply cannot be had alone,
disconnected from the people of God.
The language of
koinonia, does not speak to how people feel (which is the way
evangelicals typically use it—“we had great fellowship last
night!”), but to what is held in COMMON. It is used, for example, of
a commonly owned business or property. The joint owners do not need
to have warm feelings about each other in order to be joined in a
common enterprise. And though warm feelings are good in the church,
they are actually not at its center—I know that that is a shocking
thing to say! At its center, though, is the reality of God, whose
redeeming action in Christ on the Cross is what both unites
believers and diminishes the importance of their private
circumstances, social experiences, generational location, and
personal preferences.
It really is no
surprise that when the Holy Spirit falls in the Book of Acts (in
chapters 2, 4, 10, and 19), it is not in the privacy of people’s
homes, but in public, the last two perhaps signaling the acceptance
of Gentiles on the same grounds as Jews. Christianity was not
carried out only in private because its truth claims were and are
public as Paul made clear to Agrippa. And the letters to the seven
churches in the Book of Revelation are letters to CHURCHES and when
the mistakes and errors of these churches were not corrected, the
historical record shows that they disappeared as CHURCHES. When Paul
writes, as he does in I Cor. 3, of “wood, hay, straw” he is not
writing, as most evangelicals seem to think, of individuals though
what he says there has a derivative application to individuals, but
he is talking about CHURCHES. That passage is all about the building
of the local church and many there are today that are wood, hay, and
straw!
What I think we can
say with certainty is that we all have to maintain a twofold
relation to the Holy Spirit: one part of that is personal and the
other is corporate as part of the local church. Churches can, in
fact, lose their existence even while the Christians in them are
preserved from losing their salvation. Preserving a church’s
existence, and that kind of existence which is blessed of God, is
something that has to be worked at—and not simply by the minister.
And if what I have said is true, then those who diminish the work of
the local church or diminish their involvement in it, actually set
themselves against the will of God and of necessity impoverish
themselves.
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