Read anything written by Reggie McNeal? He is the author of The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church
A growing number of people are leaving the institutional church for a new reason. They are not leaving because they have lost faith. They are leaving the church to preserve their faith. They contend that the church no longer contributes to their spiritual development. In fact, they say, quite the opposite is true. The number of “post-congregational” Christians is growing. David Barrett, author of World Christian Encyclopedia, estimates that there are about 112 million “churchless Christians” worldwide, about 5 percent of all adherents, but he projects that number will double in the next twenty years!
I have the feeling that Europe is years ahead of North America in this trend of “churchless” or “post-congregational” Christianity.
By the way, you can listen to an audio narration of the first chapter of McNeal’s book here at New Reality Number One: The Collapse of the Church Culture.
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Related articles: A typical week “outside the box” of organized religion (Churchless.net)
The current church culture needs to collapse; it’s bankrupt. I am encouraged by the movement you write about. When you look through church history these types of movements away from the organized church usually served to purge out the lukewarm members from the Body.
What I do find interesting about Europe, however, is how it can be years ahead of North America when the Muslim religion is so quickly taking hold over there. One missionary friend of mine in Berlin says America is only about two generations behind Europe when it comes to immorality. Is the church being strengthened by this opposition? Heaven knows the church here in N. America faces very little opposition (dare I say, inconveniences compared to what some in other countries face) thus it has grown apathetic and irreverent. Opposition has always, historically, strengthened the Body, is this the case in Europe?
Lynn: A lot of people have a vested interest (boy, that’s an understatement, isn’t it?) in keeping the machine alive. But I find it absolutely amazing that some have awakened to the realization that they MUST leave the organized church “to preserve their faith,” according to Reggie McNeal. In everyday life, some things are helpful, some things are harmful, and other things are neither helpful or harmful. It’s one thing to leave, saying “I don’t get anything out of the institutional church,” but it’s quite another to say, “It’s counterproductive to my Christian life.” Wow!
When and if the current church culture collapses, another will take its place. The church is always going to look like something. A question emerges as to the nature of the church and what it should look like. The church as institution isn’t a bad thing necessarily. The church IS an institution like family is an institution and marriage is an institution. The problem is that somewhere along the line people accepted a forgery of the good and right incarnation of the church as institution.
I am finding very much attractive about the Emerging Church movement because of its emphasis on authentic community, missional and sacramental living. But I find it dangerous to embrace a protest movement (which is much a part of the emerging ethos) just for the sake of protest. There is much to be corrected in the present church culture, but it isn’t all wrong.
I read McNeal’s book and found it very helpful. I heard him speak last year and he is insightful and very hopeful about the future of the church (whatever it looks like). I wonder, however, that when the revolution is complete, if Christians won’t to be trying to figure out how to put the pieces back together.
Bill, ya know how to get a guy thinking.
Rob: It seems to me that “the Church”—the living stones being built up into a spiritual house—and “church culture” are two entirely separate things. One is conceived in the mind of God and built by the Lord Jesus Christ, while the other is man-made, extra-biblical, and unnecessary. One comes with an iron-clad guarantee of authenticity and indestructibility; the other gets continually molded and shaped like a nose of wax to suit a particular cultural environment.
I have no problems with the word “institution” to describe marriage, family, and the church AS LONG AS God is acknowledged as the One who brought them into being. But that’s not how McNeal and other critics of the church culture understand the phrase “institutional” when paired with the word “church.” From the critics’perspective, there is little resemblance between the true Church and the present structural organization that most people call “church” today: whether you’re talking about the mega-church structures with their high-powered CEO’s or the small rural structures with their deacon boards running off any pastor who gets too big for his breeches. Both can often be simply two variations of a religious club: just aimed at different markets, so to speak.
David Fredrickson has written When the Church Leaves the Building and I love what he says in the introduction, “I believe that Jesus intended for the expression and function of His earthly family to be profoundly simple and altogether different than what we call ‘church’today.” I completely agree!
Bill, I’m sure we’re arguing from the same side of the line, and that at the end of the day we would be clinking our steins together in fellowship. As I look at the church I see what you see. I see a (Western) church that has in many ways been seduced by a powerful and charming Christian Industrial Complex. I imagine that a first century believer, if teleported into the budding twenty-first century, would wonder “What in the name of God is going on here.”
But a first-century UNbeliever would also be perplexed by the world we now live in. The changes (for good and ill) have happened within and without the church. It seems that if we look at the church through the ages we would see a church that looked a lot like the culture/world in she existed.
If we look at the culture that gave rise to the Christian Industrial Complex, for instance, it was a culture that could accommodate virtually no other type of church structure (in the main). Whether our fundamentalist forbears would like to admit it or not, they contextualized the gospel to suit the cultural mores and norms of their heyday. The way the Presbys, Baptists, Methodists and even Roman Catholics did (do) church reflects the greater culture.
The culture is shifting now, so the church will shift too. The ubiquity of technology and information, the flattening of the world (in terms of commerce, communication, travel), and the emergence of post-enlightenment/postmodern presuppositions all contribute to a mood that is quite unsuited for the “modern” church with its structures and “institutionalization”. So the church is seeking ways to accommodate itself (at least in many quarters) to this new ethos.
I think the new revolutionaries (and to be clear, I am one) need to be very cognizant of the pitfalls that await down this new road. If I knew what they were I would gladly point them out, but I don’t. I am sure they exist, however. To cast off the institution is to cast off safety…not just from external enemies, but enemies within.
Additionally, the church we are criticizing is us. The church that existed in A.D. 300 is us just as much as the church of the early twenty-first century. So while we may look back and cringe at what some of our fellows have done (and are doing), we must remember that we’re looking at ourselves, members of the same body (even if parts of the body are embarrassing!).
I join you in saying that we need to continue to mature as a church, and that that means a lot of different things. We don’t mature by slashing our own throats, but by learning from our mistakes, being ever mindful of our need for one another and, most importantly, dependent upon the grace and goodness of God by His Spirit.
Clink.
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No questions about our fellowship in Christ, Rob, but I do think we’re missing each other in this dialogue. By the way, do you mind if I light my pipe while we’re chewing on this subject. It helps calm my nerves a little and I really love the aroma!
As mentioned in my last comment, two remarkably different churches exist in today’s world: the one God sees and the one seen with the eyes of men. Just to mark the distinction, I’m going to use “ekklesia” when I’m referring to simple, relational Christianity revealed in the NT and “church” when I’m referring to the human institution most people think about when that term is used.
The ekklesia on the Day of Pentecost—3,120 members if my math is accurate—came into existence by divine initiative. By A.D. 300, men like Clement of Rome (and others) had twisted that simple organism into something that no longer looked, smelled, or tasted like the community Father brought into being: complete with priests and bishops lording it over God’s people and quickly moving into a full-blown state-sanctioned church. We now look back and call it the seminal Roman Catholic church.
What happened to the ekklesia? It still exists—though normally eclipsed by the church for the most part—wherever two or three believers gather together in the name of Jesus. When Spirit-born children of God follow the Greatest Commandments, loving God and loving one another; and they pursue the Great Commission, to make disciples of the nations, THERE the ekklesia can be seen. Sometimes we get a brief glimpse of it, even in spite of the man-made churches that have been established.
So when you talk about shifting culture and how “the church reflects the greater culture,” I don’t hear your words referring to the ekklesia but rather the church. [Okay, this is really messing with my mind, too!] While the prevailing culture DOES influence the lives of the members of the ekklesia (how we dress, our mode of transport, the sort of technological advances we enjoy, etc.), it has virtually nothing to do with the simplicity to which we are called in our relational life together.
You said, “The culture is shifting now, so the church will shift too.” You’re right, but the ekklesia requires no shifting whatsoever, because it’s such a simple organism that it easily “fits” into any culture without being shaped by it. Think of the ekklesia as the ultimate “one size fits all” organism.
Do you see my point?
Another curious statement you make it, “To cast off the institution is to cast off safety…not just from external enemies, but enemies from within.” The institution is EXACTLY what we need to cast off! It’s like a pair of “concrete boots” fashioned by the church Mafia to keep us from finding our real identity as the ekklesia! From what I understand about them, the revolutionaries are calling for a complete abandonment of the institutional framework known as church, so that they can “preserve their faith,” to use Reggie McNeal’s phrase.
And don’t forget, the ekklesia Jesus is building can never be outside His loving and watchful care, and enemies pose no legitimate danger to it! So, let’s find some sledgehammers and bust out of these boots!