Why the Mission Needs the Marks of the Church
by R. Scott Clark |
(page 4 of 7)
7. “Authentic” is another useful adjective used by the EM.
We live in an age of suspicion. When we receive a telephone call
from someone we do not know, we are suspicious. The first thing we
teach our children is “stranger danger.” In my childhood we walked
and biked great distances because we thought we lived in the same
world as “Leave it to Beaver.” Today we act as if we are all in an
episode of “Cops.” Today most people assume that other people are
“working an angle.” People generally assume that others are trying
to get something from them.
Therefore, our congregations must be or become places where, when
folk visit, they find a congregation of people who are completely
authentic, i.e. a congregation of folk who are not trying to get
something from them, who are not trying to manipulate them to do
something. We must be who we are: confessional Reformed folk seeking
to glorify God and to love our neighbors. Let us be honest, many of
the “strategies” for church growth proposed over the last
twenty-five years are not about being “authentic.” There are (and
have been since the second “Great Awakening”) many methods for
manipulating people. If we want to be genuinely missional, if we
want to be about announcing the gospel of the kingdom and of
salvation, we must be credible. To be credible we must be convinced
that it is far less important what we can get from people and far
more important what we can give them: the good news and love of
Christ.
8. A third adjective to which we are driven by the EM is
“confessional.” As children of modern evangelicalism the EM are
eclectic and pluralist so that any proposed boundaries seem
necessarily arbitrary. Reformed Christians, however, are not
rootless modern evangelicals drifting from fad to fad. We have an
identity and boundaries that are defined for us by our confessions.
We recognize that our confessions form a charter, a covenant with
the past, with God, with ourselves and with our children, which
summarizes our understanding of Scripture, to which we have
voluntarily agreed, which we confess together publicly, and to which
we have solemnly sworn allegiance before Christ and the church, then
our confessions must form our ministry and they must provide our
definition of mission and missional.
We confess that our mission is to “glorify God and enjoy him
forever” and to invite others to do the same. Our mission is to know
“our only comfort in life and in death” and to invite others to
share that comfort with us. Our mission is to confess the greatness
of our sin and misery, and to invite others to do the same. Our
mission is to know with certainty that we are redeemed from all our
sins and misery by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ
alone, and to invite others to know that too. Our mission is to
become disciples living fruitful lives in the grace of Christ, and
to invite others to do the same.
One of the great concerns of the EM is dead orthodoxy. To some in
the EM, any confessional Reformed church might seem “dead orthodox”
since we do not share a number of their assumptions about the nature
of the faith, the church, or even a common definition of mission.
Reformed orthodoxy is not dead orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is dead when we
make our confession a formality that we ignore in our theology,
piety, and practice. We are the only ones who can kill orthodoxy by
ignoring it. If we are to be authentic, we must be confessional. We
must be actively, currently, enthusiastically confessing our faith
to those outside the church, to our members, and to our children. If
we are to be “live orthodox,” our confessions must shape our
theology, piety, and practice.
What the EM Gets Wrong
As many things as there are to appreciate about the EM, there are at
least nine points of serious disagreement between the Reformed faith
and the EM.
1. The EM spokesmen are unhelpfully vague about exactly what the
“mission” of God is and as a consequence they are unhelpfully vague
about what the “mission” of the church is.
2. When the EM leaders do speak clearly about the mission of the
church, that mission has precious little to do with the mission of
God and the history of redemption and revelation as Reformed
churches have understood it. Almost invariably the mission is
re-cast in activist, social-gospel, and even Anabaptist terms. This
is not my judgment; it is the judgment of EM advocate Scot McKnight,
who says of Brian McLaren’s new book, Everything Must Change: “Truth
be told, Brian is an anabaptist [sic] as I am reading him….”31
3. The EM accounts of church history seem unaware of a century of
criticism of the old and outdated “Kerygma to dogma” model of church
history. Therefore EM groups attempt to re-capture or re-create the
“authentic,” “kerygmatic,” and socially conscious apostolic
communities in our time to get past the ossified "dogma" with which
Christianity has been encrusted. I understand why they are attracted
to it, since it is just a slightly more sophisticated version of the
sort of evangelical and fundamentalist primitivism that they are
offering now. The great problem with this model is that it is just
not true. The whole Kerygma to dogma model assumed, a priori, that
the apostolic church could have no institutions, offices, or
organization. Any evidence of such organization only meant that that
portion of the NT could not be taken to be authentic.
The repeated identification of the Reformation and post-Reformation
church with “Modernity” has no basis in actual history. The
Reformation occurred a century and a half before modernity began to
dominate the West. The Reformation and post-Reformation churches
were pre-modern and they were hotly critical of modernity when it
appeared. The leading critics of Rene Descartes were not pietists,
at least not in the conventional sense of the word. The leading
critics of modernity, as it began to appear, were the orthodox
Reformed. It was the pietists, the forebears of the EM who conceded
Christianity to modernity. The nineteenth-century German liberals
who laid waste to the faith, who laid siege against the Scriptures
were all the children and grandchildren of pietists. The EM leaders
seem to be counseling us to drink more deeply from the very wells
that brought about the destruction they lament.
The great irony of the EM identification of orthodoxy with
“Modernity” is that the Modern creed had four great points to which
most segments of the EM give assent.
- The Modernist creed confesses the universal Fatherhood of God. In
the modernist religion, the utterly transcendent (or immanent) deity
is everyone's God/god in precisely the same way. It is not
confessional Calvinism, but the EM that includes universalists in
its midst.
- The Modernist creed confesses the universal brotherhood of
humanity. In the modern religion, all human beings are all one great
human family without distinction before the deity in any way. Of
course, confessing as we do double predestination and limited
atonement, it is unlikely that confessional Calvinism will be
confused with modernity, but how distinct from the modern creed is
the EM?
- The Modernist creed confesses human and social perfectibility. If
you are of a certain age, you may remember the slogan, “We’re
getting better every way and every day.” As dark Calvinists with our
doctrine of the depravity of every human faculty, we are not good
candidates for alignment with the Modernist creed, but the same
cannot be said for many elements of the EM.
- The most basic Modernist confession is that of human autonomy, the
ability to will the contrary to all other wills, even God’s, is what
makes one human. As confessors of human depravity and divine
sovereignty, confessional Reformed theology utterly rejects this
foundational Modernist doctrine, which is a significant reason we
are seen as unreasonable and even anti-human by Modernists. It is
far from clear that the EM leaders find themselves with the same
antithesis to Modernity on this basic point.
Footnotes (on this page)
31 http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=2917 (accessed 12 October, 2007).
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