There is a lot of talk these days about rethinking how we “do church.” Everybody seems to have ideas about how to rescue the church from the brink of irrelevance. Business/marketing model advocates always have another technique or promotion to grow the church; seeker-model apologists can always find a felt need that has yet to be met by their previous methods; and the emergent proponents continue to deconstruct the seeker and marketing church models (to their credit) only to proceed unhindered by the constraints of sound doctrine to decompose the church into a social community of individual agnostics.
When I read the following sections of David Wells’ The Courage to Be Protestant, I was compelled to create this page and share it with others. This is a phenomenal book and this section is but a taste of Wells’ insights–buy and read this book!
Forget Rethinking the Church
Today, prodigious amounts of energy are being poured into this effort. Everything about the church must be rethought! We must rethink how it becomes successful! We must rethink it all because this is what businesses have to do! Their products are all the time dying as new niches and needs arise. So it is in the church! Rethink or die!
In my view, so much of this rethinking confuses rethinking the nature of the church with rethinking its performance. For the multitude of pragmatists who are leading churches in America today, these are one and the same thing. The church is nothing but its performance. There is nothing to be said about the church that cannot be reduced to how it is doing, and that is a matter for constant inventories, poll taking, daily calculations, and strategizing.
I beg to differ. These are two entirely different matters. We intrude into what is not our business when, in our earnest pursuit of success in the church, which we think we can manufacture, we confuse its performance with its nature. Let me explain.
The church is not our creation. It is not our business. We are not called upon to manage it. It is not there for our own success. It is not a business. The church, in fact, was never our idea in the first place. No, it is not the church we need to rethink.
Rather, it is our thoughts about the church that need to be rethought. It is the church’s faithfulness that needs to be reexamined. It is its faithfulness to who it is in Christ, its faithfulness in living out its life in the world, that should be occupying us. The church, after all, is not under our management but under God’s sovereign care, and what he sees as health is very often rather different from what we imagine its health to be.
The church, let us remember, is called the “church of God” (Gal. 1:13; 1 Cor. 15:9). Churches are “the churches of Christ” (Rom. 16:16) because they are his, bought by his precious blood. Christ not only constituted the church (Matt. 16:18), but God has given us the blueprint for its life in Scripture. What we need to do, then, first and foremost, is to think God’s thoughts after him, think about the church in a way that replicates his thoughts about it. We need to ask ourselves how well, or how badly, we are realizing our life in Christ in the church, how far and how well churches stand as the outposts of the kingdom of God in our particular culture.1
Near the end of the book, Wells reveals the source of his confidence in the success of the church
God is Sovereign
First, when Paul says it is God who grows the church, he clearly is assuming that God is sovereign. God rules over all of life, bringing about his providential will, from the mighty events like the falling of empires to the most insignificant, like the falling of the sparrow. This means that within this world, kingdoms and cultures rise and fall according to his sovereign will. Paul says he has even established the nations’ boundaries (Acts 17:26). Nothing, therefore, is more absurd than the panic that now grips the evangelical church. It is terrorized by the specter of postmodernity. Reading today’s “how-to” literature, one has to draw the conclusion that the church’s days are numbered unless we rush in to prop it up with our own know-how. God you see, has more on his hands than he can possibly handle. Unless the church capitulates and kisses its (post) modern enemies, it is done for!
The desperate measures being proposed for these desperate times are often little more than a case of weak knees and unbelief. We believe altogether too little in God’s sovereign control, otherwise we would not be in full retreat before the pressures and demands of the (post)modern world. We look like the soldiers of some sorry nation tat are very brave when they are safe in their protected barracks but, at the first sight of the enemy, lay down our arms and run.
The truth is that there is nothing in tour postmodern world that is a serious threat, or an insurmountable obstacle, to the will of God. This true of his saving will as well. He is as sovereign in the way he begets faith today as he is over the sparrow that flies or falls. He will grow the church. Today, we no longer seem to believe this, and want to aid his cause by our weak and foolish capitulations.2
