The Church (Part I)

Gordon Fee, one of pentecostalism’s most widely-respected scholars, tells a story in the opening of his book, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. He relates his answer to a seminary student who asked him what his focus would be were he to enter the pastoral ministry at that point in his lifelong career in academia/higher education. He writes that, without hesitating, he replied to the student that he would try to help the church understand what it means that they are the eschatological people of God. He further shares that he told his students that he had no idea how he would go about doing that. I have often thought of my work as a pastor—in combination with my theological reflection—as an attempt to faithfully complete that task.

So, what does it mean that the church is the eschatological people of God? For starters, some clarification of the term eschatological. Eschatology is often used as a term for ‘the end times’ (used interchangeably with ‘the last days’), which in popular Christian imagination often signifies cataclysmic judgments of the type found (or imagined to be found) in the book of Revelation. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that the Bible itself tells us that ‘the last days’ began at about the time of Jesus’ resurrection.° In Peter’s Pentecost sermon, he substitutes the words ‘in the last days’ (Acts 2:17) for the prophet Joel’s ‘after these things’ (Joel 2:28), explicitly calling out the arrival of the final era of redemptive history. Other New Testament references to the arrival of the last days abound, but I will not detail them here. My more limited purpose is to frame the conversation about the church with the idea that it is (already) the last days.◊

To establish a baseline, here are some of the things I believe about the church. The New Testament tells us that the church is the place on the earth where the Holy Spirit uniquely dwells. I would argue that the church is God’s most precious possession on the earth, as it is made up of the people who have acknowledged, with appropriate gratitude and worship, the love that God has shown in offering on the cross God’s own life for us in Jesus. By virtue of its being inhabited by the Creator of all, I would suggest that the church is the highest authority on earth. Its authority is exercised in a different way than that of prime ministers, presidents, and kings, but it is superior nonetheless. The church should be a foretaste of heaven. So much so, in fact, that I believe conversations about what the church could be/do should always include someone objecting that ‘It’s not going to be that way this side of the return of Jesus.’ If we’re not at least flirting with that line, then (in my opinion) we vastly underestimate the life, the power, and the creative intent of the Spirit of God in, for, and through the church.

A definition I use (not in any way assumed to be exhaustive or comprehensive—that would take a book-length work), building on some language adopted from Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, is this: the church is a prophetic reality, called into existence by God, to serve as an alternative society, contrast culture, a counter-Kingdom to the kingdoms of this world. The missiologist Lesslie Newbigin also supplied some of my favorite language about the church: it is the sign, instrument, and foretaste of the Kingdom. Oliver O’Donovan’s words resonate with me as well: “it is called into existence in order to witness… through its own life and word… the final manifestation of God’s rule on earth.”†

All this needs elaborating, and I will attempt to unpack as much of this as possible in future posts. What I want to emphasize immediately, however, in the context of this discussion of the astonishing promise and potential that surround the church, is the requirement that the church be characterized by humility, apart from which it cannot hope to be named after the One it claims as its Lord. No matter how faithfully or powerfully the church instantiates, manifests, or images the Kingdom, there is always a more dramatic distance between what it is and what the Kingdom will be than there is between a specific church and its surrounding culture. No church, however holy it may seek or strive (or imagine itself) to be, will ever be entirely free of those elements of the culture that are out of alignment with the character of the Kingdom and its King. If a church did manage to become perfectly unlike the world, it will have at precisely that point failed at its mission, because it would necessarily lack that which would give it the closest connection with and likeness to the world: those who have only recently come out of the world. (Another, complementary, angle to approach the church with humility is to realize that even when the church falls short of our highest aspirations for it, Jesus is faithful: it will most assuredly be revealed in eternity that the Spirit accomplished far more through our efforts at faithfulness than we had the capacity to perceive.)

Rather than coming to a conclusion, my desire is to stir your imagination… maybe even to inspire some holy dissatisfaction in your acceptance of the church as it is compared to what it could be. What do you think it might look like if your local church started to dream of being and working toward goals that aren’t likely to be possible on this side of the return of Jesus? What could the relationships be like? What could the redemptive influence on the immediate community, the wider soceity, and even the world, be?

One of the marks of the early church was that there were no needy people, because the believers contributed to take care of whatever needs might arise. I often imagine our church eliminating every need in the congregation, such that we needed to look the neighborhood around the church, with an ever-expanding sphere of needs getting met even beyond the limits of the city of San Francisco. (If you examine the logic of Malachi 3:10-12, I think you’ll find that this scenario is closer to what is being promised than the prosperity of the individual giver.) I don’t at all limit the redemptive sphere of influence to monetary needs. What about people whose humanity is being robbed by drug addiction, neighborhoods where fear of violence pervades, the epidemic of loneliness, families ravaged by domestic violence? Just much how good do you think could result from a church understanding itself as the eschatological/end-times people of God?

° Scholars differ as to whether the preaching of John the Baptist, the resurrection of Jesus, or the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost marks the beginning of these last days/end times.

◊ What is interesting is that the Jewish expectation fulfilled in Jesus was the arrival not of an extended period of ‘last days’, but of the definitive onset of ‘the age to come’ (or the New Creation, the New Heavens and the New Earth, or what Christians might call ‘heaven.’) I’ll get into this in an upcoming post.

† Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 189.