ecclesiology (church)

My Wish for the Contemporary Evangelical Church

Lisa Spencer8 Comments

Laura over at Enough Light posted her 2012 top posts and highlighted this gem of a post, Does Your Church Make People Jump Through Hoops? Stop it!. She writes on a very important topic – the life and health of the church. I would encourage you to read it. The thrust of the argument is how newcomers are expected to jump through hoops to get on board. Now, no church or its leadership will confess to this directly. But it does come out in subtle ways or maybe not so subtle.  The goal is to bring people on board. So the visitor is expected to join the body. Once officially joined, there is the expectation of participation. The participation of course, should contribute to the vision and mission of what that local assemblies’ leadership has prescribed for the church to do. Therefore, when individuals come into the fold, the way they fit in is to do as prescribed. In this scenario the visitor/newcomer is seen as a commodity to make the church strong rather than a vital member of the body based on their faith.

I believe this to be a common scenario in today’s contemporary evangelical church, particularly independent, non-denominational churches. But there is something under the hood that motivates this type of corporate structure where people only feel valuable according to what they do, whether it be to join this or that ministry or small group or other defined obligations. Here’s what I think is going on. The contemporary church by and large has operated under the premise of what they do as opposed to who they are. Put differently, the contemporary church has defined itself by what it does instead of who it is, the body of Christ united together to grow itself up together in love (Ephesians 4:16). Of course there are exceptions. But the more emphasis that is placed on the definition of the church being what it does, the more will be expected of individual members to jump on board in order to fulfill the church’s definition. Continue reading →

Sex and the New Jerusalem City

Lisa Spencer2 Comments

Multicultural gatheringMy friend Damian and I had a recent email exchange regarding preaching tendencies related to the contemporary evangelical culture. This comes with a philosophy that we need to be so relatable that it ends up obscuring God’s overall redemptive program. He talked about this one class in his seminary program in which discussions of Song of Solomon which resulted in placing a good dose of emphasis on human sexuality. With his permission, I’m posting his full response:

 I am firmly convinced of the allegorical interpretation of the text as God’s love, expressed in anthropomorphic terms, for His people. Karl Barth’s idea, echoed by John Paul II – that sexual differentiation is the defining feature of our humanness, the key that unlocks the door to human identity – seems to have conquered the day in modern evangelicalism . But I would challenge this thesis: If Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness since Christ did not participate in any of these.

There appears to be an obsession in modernity, swallowed hook, line, and sinker, by the evangelical church, that by analyzing our own sexuality, we believe we will finally discover the deep secret truth of our humanness. To borrow from Foucault, he claims that we are obsessed not with sex itself (as a physical act), but with “the truth of sex” – with the idea that sex is a revelation of truth. Thus we form sexual sub-cultures; we worry about the ever-more-precise definition of all our sexual habits and preferences; we constantly think about our sexuality; we write about it incessantly; we “confess” our sexual secrets and peculiarities; we have never been fully honest about ourselves until we have given utterance to our sexuality. (A fascinating example of this is the way biographers assume that the sexual life of their subjects will disclose the deep secret truth about who they “really” are.) Continue reading →

Instead of Relevant…Go Retro

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I’m off school for a couple of weeks, which has allowed me some breathing room and dig out from mire of Hebrew exegetical work and more. I still have a ton of school work but thought I’d catch up on some other reading as well. Since issues related to ecclesiology have been forefront on my mind lately, I picked up reading RetroChristianity, by Michael J Svigel from where I left off when the semester began. Now I confess I have a bit of a bias since Dr. Svigel is one of the profs in the Theological Studies dept at DTS, which is the dept of my ThM focus. But I also took him for Trinitarianism and Historical Theology I. Funny, Smart, a passion for church history (he loves the Apostolic Fathers), he has an even greater passion for Christians to think and behave Christianly and for the church to represent the faith well. This pours out of RetroChristianity and makes it a book worth reading.

In the past 500 years since the Protestant Reformation, things have gotten a bit crazy…and off course. Yet we live in the present and must contend with present realities. His solution is not abandon the present to capture the past NOR to forget the past and focus on the present (well actually we’re doing a pretty darn good job of the latter). Rather, he proposes reclaiming the past for the present.  In a nutshell;

RetroChristianity also acknowledges the egocentric nature of many evangelicals’ approaches to church and spirituality. We need to counter the preference-driven mentality rampant among so many churches, replacing it with a more biblical, historical, and theological framework through which we can make informed decisions regarding doctrine, practice and worship. This will help us wisely balance the vital elements of church, worship, ministry, and spirituality, avoiding excesses, extremes, distractions and distortions.(21) Continue reading →

Do Seeker Oriented Services Hurt Church Growth?

Lisa Spencer5 Comments

seekersI’ve been reflecting a lot lately on issues related to ecclesiology and have been asking this question specifically related to seeker oriented services. Now I know that seeker oriented services are kind of a sacred cow and some won’t agree with my thoughts here. But I am really begin to question whether this is best for our local assembly.

But first a qualifying note: when I say church growth I don’t mean physical expansion, i.e. more members, bigger facilities or church plants. What I mean is the local assembly growing up in Christ and demonstrating corporately what that means. That is not necessarily a function of numerical growth but of member maturity because it’s in that maturity that the body of Christ as represented in the local church grows and functions as it should. This is marked by devotion towards God, love towards each other, mutual exchange of gifts and dedication to the proclamation of the gospel.

Ironically, as I was reflecting on this issue, I saw this article posted by Scot McKnight today providing tips on who to preach to mixed audiences effectively. Well, I think these are worthy tips if one is preaching outside of the regular assembly. However, I maintain a firm commitment to the belief that our corporate gatherings are for the purpose of feeding the faith of believers and equipping them for service. The book of Ephesians and the pastoral epistles convict of me such. Otherwise, why gather if not support that which is needed to mature our faith? So that leads me to ask if something gets lost by blurring this focus. Continue reading →