The Enduring Church

Believers in every age worry about the collapse of the faith.

Jennifer Powell McNutt  |  posted 1/25/2011

If I were to write about the burdens of the preacher as I have experienced them and as I know them,” declared Martin Luther, “I would scare everybody off.”

A glance at 21st-century headlines about religion and the church would not have made Luther feel any better than he did in the 16th. We live in a context of ominous bulletins about the value and place of religion in society. Many people still believe in the classic secularization theory, that modernity inevitably entails the steady decline of religion.

With magazines like  Newsweek  announcing “The End of Christian America,” it is easy to give in to fear and the perception of decline. Not only can worries like that become self-fulfilling, more often than not, they also blind one to the enduring nature of the visible church in our world.

It would be hard to find a century when the church and clergy have not faced challenges in ministry and concerns about decline. Just counting the number of historical studies detailing the “crisis” and “anxiety” of ages past suggests these labels are too worn-out to be descriptive anymore.

Consider the decline that challenged Christianity during the last phase of imperial persecution in the early 4th century, when Christians lapsed or were martyred and churches and Christian books destroyed. The faith ultimately spread and flourished in response. But though imperial persecution ceased with the Edict of Milan in 313, unity was elusive. The church was coming to grips with an ecclesiology of wheat and tares in a fallen world. Some, like Augustine of Hippo, welcomed lapsed Christians back into the church, while the Donatists rejected them.

The church also has dealt with its share of moral decline. The medieval church confronted financial corruption and clerical immorality. Reform efforts starting in the 10th century at the Benedictine abbey in Cluny, France, flourished but eventually led to the same patterns of corruption. Subsequent centuries saw further attempts under the Cistercians and other religious orders. In time, however, the Observant Movement sought to call back even the mendicants to their original rule, regarding themselves, as Reformation historian Heiko Oberman put it, “as the green branches on the languishing tree of the Church.”

The pope did not escape condemnation either. “Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin,” observed Francis Petrarch while the papacy was in residence at Avignon. “Instead of holy solitude we find a criminal host and crowds of the most infamous satellites; instead of soberness, licentious banquets; instead of pious pilgrimages, preternatural and foul sloth; instead of the bare feet of the apostles, the snowy coursers of brigands fly past us, the horses decked in gold and fed on gold, soon to be shod with gold, if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.”

Schism erupted on the heels of the Avignon papacy, when three popes attempted to rule at the same time. One papal official responded, “Today there is a disappearance, nay, a complete abandonment, of good moral practices, for simony, avarice, the sale of benefices, tyranny, and cruelty hold sway, approved as it were by wont amongst the ecclesiastics.”

Even eras of reform and revival, such as the movement in 16th-century Geneva, saw periods of great turmoil. Though John Calvin found himself welcome when he returned to Geneva in 1541 after a three-year exile, he still faced substantial opposition from congregants. In July 1549, Calvin’s preaching caused a public riot, which historian William Naphy attributes to the spread of xenophobia within Geneva in response to the influx of French refugees. This was not a first-time experience for Calvin. In March 1546, protests interrupted his sermon when he critiqued a group of congregants who had danced at a wedding and lied to the authorities about it. For years, scholars questioned the success of the German Reformation based on similar evidence that parishioners were unable ¢â‚¬”even unwilling ¢â‚¬”to live up to the Reformers’ ideals.

More…http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/january/29.44.html?start=1