PART A: THE RENEWAL OF THE LIFE AND MISSION OF THE
CHURCH

(1) WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘CHURCH’?

The English word ‘church’ came via German and Latin
from the Greek kyriakon (‘that which belongs to the Lord’). Originally
it was an adjective, doma or oikia, ‘the Lord’s house’, hence
its use of a building in which worship is conducted. Thus ‘church’
in our language derives from a post-biblical usage.

The New Testament word is ekklesia – a public gath-
ering, assembly, meeting. It never refers to a building, but rather
to people. Ekklesia, etymologically, signified a ‘called-out people’,
but there is no hint of this connot- ation in the New Testament.
Its rough equivalent there is with the Hebrew gahal, the people
of God assembled to worship him. Thus the New Testament church
is not a ‘sect’, separating itself from the world, but a people
of God gathering to and for the Lord, worshipping him, fellowshipping
together, being formed into Christ, and serving the world.

Ekklesia occurs only twice in the gospels (Matthew
16:18, 18:17), once to refer to the Church of Christ, the other
the Jewish synagogue. However, these two passages do not exhaust
the teaching of Jesus about the church. Note, for example, his
calling of the disciples to comprise his ‘little flock’ to which
the Kingdom is given (Luke 12:32, Matthew 26:31, John 10:1-18);
to signify this new community of the Messiah, Jesus uses the image
of the temple (Mark 13:2, 14:58). The new temple which he will
build is ‘the community of those who believe in him who is the
agent by whom God manifested his presence among us’. (1) Of the
remaining 110 times ekklesia appears in the New Testament, most
occur in Paul, the Acts, and the Revelation. It can designate
a house fellowship (Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19, Philemon
2, Colossians 4:15) a local church (eg in Syrian Antioch, Acts
13:1, 14:27,15:3; Ephesus, Acts 20:17,28); the mother church in
Jerusalem (Acts 5:11, 8:1, 11:22, 12:1,5, 15:4,22); groups of
churches (Judaea, Galilee, Samaria, Acts 9:31, Syria and Cilicia,
Acts 15:41, 16:5) or the universal church (Acts 20:28, 1 Corinthians
12:28, Ephesians 1:22). So ‘church’ in the New Testament denotes
an assembly of persons summoned for a particular purpose; a community
of believers gathered from the inhabitants of a specific area;
a community gathered by God through Christ; and the eschatological
people of God. (2)

Recent New Testament scholarship has helped clarify
the relationship between local churches and the universal church.
The local church is essentially a microcosm of the church universal,
but no single body of believers may designate itself as the church
(ie the total church). (3) The Arndt-Gingrich Lexicon notes that
‘the local as well as the universal church is more specifically
called ekklesia tou theou (the church of God) or ekklesia tou
christou (the church of Christ). This is essentially Pauline usage,
and it serves to give the current Greek term its Christian colouring
and thereby its specific meaning.’ (4)

The New Testament offers many images of the church.
In fact, the word meant different things to different biblical
writers (and still may mean several things – even to the same
person!). In the appendix of Images of the Church in the New Testament,
Paul Minnear lists 96 analogies which he classifies as (1) minor
images, (2) the people of God, (3) the new creation, (4) the fellowship
in faith, and (5) the body of Christ. (5)

The Church Today

How do we define ‘church’ in the world of the 1980s
and 90s? For Cyprian ‘where the bishop is, there is the church’
and ‘he cannot have God for his Father who does not have the church
for his mother’. (6) Medieval churchmen developed a dualistic
notion of the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ churches. The Reformers
would have said, ‘where scriptural doctrine is adhered to, there
is the church’. (7) The Anabaptists: ‘where converted believers
are gathered, there is the church.’ Pietists organized ‘little
churches within the church’ (ecclesiola in ecclesia) for Bible
study, fellowship and prayer. (8) Modern sects tell us the ‘church’
is an impediment ot the effective preaching of the gospel, hence
their preachments against ‘churchianity’. For many of them, there
is no salvation outside their particular group (and as the number
of Christian denominations has increased in this century from
about 1,000 to 22,000 that’s pretty confusing to many non-Christians).

The Real and the Existent

C.S. Lewis’s Devil describes the church visible:
‘One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not
misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread
out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible
as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which
makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite
invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished,
sham Gothic erection of the new building estate. When he goes
inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression
on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing
a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little
book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics,
mostly bad, and in very small print. When he goets to his pew
and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours
who he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on
those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression
like ‘the Body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew’.
(9)

The Church, says William Willimon, has smug hypocrites
both inside and outside. ‘There is an arrogance and pharisaical
self-righteousness among the churches and among the unchurched
as well… As David H.C. Read has suggested, today’s new hypocrites
may not be like the smug churchgoing Pharisee in Jesus’ story
who stood apart from the penitent publican… Today’s hypocrites
are more likely to be those smug publicans outside the church
who pray ‘God, I may not be the best person in the world, but
at least I am better than all those religious hypocrites in the
church’.’ (10)

So our thinking has to grapple with what Richard
Newhaus calls the ‘real’ church (what we ought to be) and the
‘existent’ church (what we are). ‘The Bride of Christ mentioned
in Revelation 21 will be something quite new to our eyes, but
she will be no stranger, for we will recognize her as the whore
of Christendom transformed. It is only by trusting that promise
that we dare to call the whore of Christendom the Bride of Christ.
We do so in hope, and that hope is the foundation of our ministry…
The trouble with our distinctions between the church of faith
and the church of fact, between the visible church and the invisible
church, is that we permit distinctions to become separations …
It is easy to think that we love an abstract, spirit- ualized,
de-historicized church, just as it is easy to love abstract, spiritualized,
de-historicized people. In truth, to love abstractions is not
to love at all; it is but a sentimental attachment to our own
whimsies’. (11)

W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, in his The Renewal of the Church
states his view of the Protestant tradition. We acknowledge in
faith the existence within the church of a true body of Christ
into which we have been received and by which we are sustained
in the Christian life. ‘This body of Christ need not and cannot
be renewed’ (emphasis mine). (12)

The real church is the one Christ loved and for which
he gave his life. If he loved us while we were yet sinners, so
we should love one another. Bonhoeffer reminds us that the one
‘who loves a dream of a community more than the Christian community
itself becomes a destroyer of the latter’, and then follows with
his devastating injunction to pastors never to complain about
their congregations, ‘certainly never to other people, but also
not to God!’ (13)

However, if we view the church too uncritically,
we are not, I believe, in the true apostolic and prophetic tradition.
Those early church leaders did not let their charges ‘off the
hook’: the New Testament documents are replete with exhortations
to the churches – all of them. Seward Hiltner makes the point
that if (young ordained ministers) ‘have no criticism of the status
quo, probably ecclesiastical rigor mortis has set in’. (14) We
live in the tension between the actual and the ideal; rather in
the ‘liminal’ threshold area of the ideal-hidden-and-perceived-by-faith-in-the-actual.
(15) We are to be ‘critical lovers’ or ‘loving critics’ of the
church, realizing that we are all falling short of the glory of
God all the time, and that the church itself is glorious, not
because it is perfect, but because it is being redeemed. The church
is a kind of centaur: half human, half divine; half earthly, half
heavenly; half flesh, half spirit; half in the world, half not
of the world; half a sociological entity, half a spiritual reality.
We must be critical of today’s church, but we are humbly critical,
and constructively critical, and prayerfully critical. And, through
it all, we remind ourselves of the truth: ‘Without Christ, no
church’.

The New Testament churches and ours

The churches in the New Testament were not perfect,
but they were dynamic. The biblical images of the church are never
static: I am the vine, you are the branches (Jesus); you are the
body of Christ (Paul); you are a holy nation (1 Peter)… in order
that (hina) the world may believe (in the fourth gospel); in order
that you may declare (1 Peter). Karl Barth asserts ‘The first
congregation was a visible group, which caused a visible public
uproar. If the church has not this visibility, then it is not
the church’. (16) The church of today claims to be related to
the apostolic church, but sometimes you would never know. In a
sermon ‘The Ministry of a Transfigured Church’ J. H. Jowett asks:
‘Is the Pentecostal morning repeated, and is the gracious miracle
the talk of the town? Does the multitude come together ‘greatly
wondering’? What happens [when church-members come together]?
Are we held in solemn and enriching amazement at the awful doings?
Is there about us a mysterious impressiveness which arrests the
multitude, and which sends abroad a spirit of questioning like
a healthy contagion?’ (17)

In his Ephesians: A Positive Affirmation Leonard
Griffith has a two-paragraph delineation of the ‘Christ-centred
church’: ‘The Christ-centered church will look closely at its
programs to make certain that they confront people with Christ
and don’t simply keep people busy. For a long time we labored
under the theory that the effective church is the active church,
regardless of the type of activities that takes place within its
walls. We felt guilty if a cubic foot of space was not being used
day and night… The effective church of the future may have very
little going on within its walls, but it may be a place of which
someone can say as Zacchaeus did of his sycamore tree, ‘This is
where I found Christ’… The effective church may be one that
spends less time discussing its policies and more time praying
for Christ’s guidance. It may be a church on its knees’. (18)

‘All too often’, wrote David Watson just before he
died of cancer, ‘I have attended dreary church services when I
have come away spiritually more dead than alive. Any thinking
person, searching for a personal faith, might well conclude that
surely God was not in that place. This is a travesty of the vibrant
worship that should always be there when God’s people come together
to praise his name. The format or liturgy of the service is not
a priority for me …. but I long to be in a place where the worship
is alive. The Jewish festivals in Old Testament days were full
of music, singing and dancing, and we can understand why the psalmist
said, ‘I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the
house of the Lord!"’ (Psalm 122:1).’ (19) The nature of our
worship too often reveals less the joyful song of the ‘new person’
than the tiresome and familiar refrain of the old captivity in
which nothing has been made new.’ (20) Wasn’t it Tennyson who
said something about ‘the churchmen’ (who) ‘fain would kill their
church’? A novelist began his book: ‘It was twelve noon by the
courthouse clock, and the church on the corner was giving up its
dead.’ When someone asked S. Parkes Cadman, a noted radio preacher,
‘Where are the dead?’ he replied, ‘I don’t know about all the
dead, but some are on my board of deacons’. (21)

Or, in the words of T.S. Eliot:

The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly
in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh
and blood.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err In compassing material
ends, While the True Church need never stir To gather in its dividends.

The hippopotamus’s day Is passed in sleep; at night
he hunts; God works in a mysterious way – The Church can sleep
and feed at once. (22)

Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda

The church must view itself as perpetually in transition
(transitus) and in need of conversion (metanoia). jAdvocates of
renewal – certainly of revolution – within the church will always
conflict with those who see any change as threatening. Jurgen
Moltmann quotes the nineteenth century revivalist theologian Gottfried
Menken: ‘All revolutions are contrary to the kingdom of God’.
And August Vilmar (1831): ‘Revolution’ (is) ‘the monster from
the abyss … the abomination of desolation’. (23)

On the other hand, conciliar theologian Albert van
den Heuvel asserts ‘it is very difficult to be more revolutionary
than the gospel is’. (24) And from a conservative evangelical
viewpoint, in Larson’s and Osborne’s The Emerging Church, we find
this astonishing statement: ‘We are not talking about renewal.
Renewal is a concept foreign to the emerging church. Renewal implies
that the church was once what God intended it to be and that our
task is to bring back that golden age. From its earliest beginnings
until now, the church has been in the process of becoming, and
it shall always be so… We have nothing of perfection to which
we may return… Not renewal but a new thing is our concern…’
(25) This naive and dangerous write-off of all tradition presumes
that God wasn’t alive and active in the history of his people.

When I was in seminary in the 1960s books with titles
like The Comfortable Pew, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, The
Suburban Captivity of the Churches, How to Become a Bishop Without
Being Religious, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, announced a new era
in the understanding of church and ministry. The post-war ‘placid
decade’ was giving way to the turbulent Vietnam/hippie era; a
Catholic became president of the U.S.; Billy Graham and Norman
Vincent Peale reminded the faithful of values being threatened
by increasingly pervasive secularism and despair; Pope John XXIII
was urging the Catholic church to open its windows to the twentieth
century, and relate the depositum fidei to the contemporary world;
the World Council of Churches was becoming more ‘political’; Carl
F H Henry and other evangelicals began defining the differences
between themselves and the fundamentalists; the civil rights,
feminist and ecology movements were gathering momentum…

‘Renewal movements’ of all kinds began talking about
dismantling most of the church’s cherished traditions. The radical
theologians questioned orthodox notions about God, the church
and the world; neo-pentecostalism introduced joy into the mainline
churches’ ‘ho-hum’ church-as-usual routine … And there was liturgical
renewal, structural renewal, church architectural renewal… But
perhaps most important of all, at least for our purposes, was
the publication of Hendrick Kraemer’s A Theology of the Laity,
with his powerful plea that the apparatus of the church be directed
towards encouraging the ordinary members of the church becoming
what they are in Christ, rather than maintaining historical institutions
and formulations.

But we still have a long way to go. Most of the renewal
thinking has remained on the bookshelves. ‘Church leaders told
their younger clergy to read the renewal literature and do something
with it. But the renewal of the church to which the churches had
pledged themselves, and about which all synods and bishops’ councils
spoke, did not come. Experiments remained experiments… And the
local church, more than any other expression of the church, remained
the same – a bit emptier perhaps, a bit redecorated perhaps, but
it was not renewed … The number of graduates of the theological
schools who will not be ordained to the local ministry grows.
The number of clergy who are queuing up for any secular job is
indicative…(26) The church has been very tentative about equipping
its people to be servants in the world rather than making life
better for folks in the church. (27)

The key reason, I believe, for inertia in the church
is fear: fear of change, fear of growth, fear of parting with
cherished traditions, fear by the leaders that their power and
status will be threatened if they give more respons- ibility to
laypeople. ‘Fears do make us traitors’, Shakes- peare wrote. Fear
and risk-taking are inimical to each other. Peter Drucker, in
Landmarks of Tomorrow wrote: ‘Innovation is more than a new method.
It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than chance
or of certainty. It is a new view of our role in the universe;
we create order by taking risks. And this means that innovation,
rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance
of responsibility’. (28)

Dramatic changes are overtaking the church anyway
in the last decade and a half of the twentieth century. Sociologists
predict that two-thirds of Christians will live in the southern
hemisphere in the year 2000. And the poor, particularly in places
like Latin America, are beginning to recognize a vision for the
church that is quite alien to that of the affluent West; (29)
hence the recently-coined phrase ‘Third Church’. (30) The call
for Christians in the West is to ‘take time to experience a life
that is different from our lives, and to see a world that is not
visible to the ordinary glance’. (31) We are witnessing in our
time a strategic confluence of the streams of spirituality and
justice, contemplation and praxis, even in some previously conservative
corners of the church. (32)

So there is still hope. Jurgen Moltmann begin his
Hope for the Church with this simple thesis: The local congregation
is the future of the church. (33) That is our assumption, too,
but before we look in more detail at a biblical view of the local
church renewed, we must examine the notion of renewal itself.

ENDNOTES

(1) Ph.-H Menoud, ‘Church’, Vocabulary of the Bible,
ed. J.J. von Allmen, E.T., 1958, 52, quoted by W. Ward Gasque,
‘The Church in the New Testament’, in D.J. Ellis & W. Ward
Gasque (eds), In God’s Community: The Church and Its Ministry.
London: Pickering & Inglis, 1978, 1-3. (2) P.S. Minear, ‘Church,
Idea of’ in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Abingdon,
1962, Vol. 1, 608. (3) A Skevington Wood, ‘The Local Church’ in
Howard Belben, ed., Ministry in the Local Church, London: Epworth,
1986, 6. (4) William F Arndt and F Wilbur Gingrich (eds), A Greek-English
Lexicon of the New Testament, University of Chicago Press, 1957,
240. (5) Cited by R.L. Omanson, ‘The Church’ in Elwell, Walter
A. (Ed), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Michigan: Baker,
1984, 231. (6) Hence the saying extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside
the church (there is) no salvation. Cf. Vatican I’s (1869-70)
affirmation: ‘Outside the church no one can be saved …. Who
is not in this ark will perish in the flood’. (7) Note article
VII of the Augsburg Confession: [The church is] ‘the assembly
of all believers, in which the gospel is purely preached and the
sacraments rightly administered according to the gospel’. (8)
Cf T S Eliot’s distinction between ‘the Christian community’ –
the institutional church – and the ‘community of Christians’ –
which is the ‘church within the church.’ Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding
of the Church, draws a distinction between the ecclesia, the supernatural
koinonia of Jesus Christ, and the church. Roland Allen, citing
these usages, goes on to quote a D P Thomson, who said the people
in our churches correspond closely to the people who surrounded
Jesus during his earthly ministry. ‘There were the 5000 – the
curious, the interested crowd who came to see the miracles. And
so in our churches there are the … ‘fringers’… Then there
were the seventy – the people Jesus sent out two by two. These…
are the dependable workers, the leaders of the organizations,
seldom articulate, but loyal to their church. Then there were
the twelve – the small band of people who had been confronted
by Christ, and who had responded to his call. A narrower circle
in our congregations, perhaps, but present in most of them. Then,
finally, the intimate friends of the Master who went with him
to the Mount of Transfiguration – Peter, James and John. Are there
not in our midst that tiny handful of those who have truly ‘been
with Jesus’?’ The Face of My Parish, London: SCM, 1954, 50-1.
(9) C S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, New York, Macmillan, 1962,
15-16. (10) William Willimon, What’s Right with the Church, San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985, 23. I am indebted to his first
chapter ‘Where is the Church?’ for some of the insights in this
paper. (11) Richard Newhaus, Freedom for Ministry, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1979, 11-12. (12) Cited in James D Smart, The
Rebirth of Ministry, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960, 177. (13)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1954, 27, 29. (14) Seward Hiltner, Ferment in Ministry, Nashville:
Abingdon, 1969, 25. (15) Latin limen, threshold. Cf Victor Turner’s
notion of ‘liminality’ adapted to an ecclesiology by Tom Driver,
‘Justice and the Servant Task of Pastoral Ministry’, in Earl E
Shelp & Ronald H. Sumnderland, The Pastor as Servant, New
York: Pilgrim, 1986, 48. (16) Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline,
New York: Harper & Row, 1959, 142. (17) J H. Jowett, The Transfigured
Church, London: James Clark, 1910, 10-11. (18) Leonard Griffith,
Ephesians: A Positive Affirmation, Word, 1975, 58-9. (19) David
Watson, Fear No Evil, H. & S, 1984, 60. (20) Paul Hoon, The
Integrity of Worship, Nashville: Abingdon, 1971,24. (21) Leonard
Griffith, op cit, 9. (22) T S Eliot, ‘The Hippopotamus’, The Complete
Poems and Plays, 1909-50, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,
1952, 30-31. (23) Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of
the Spirit, London: SCM, 1977, 41. (24) Albert van den Heuvel,
The Humiliation of the Church, London: SCM, 1966, 39. (25) Bruce
Larson and Ralph Osborne, The Emerging Church, Waco: Word Books,
1970, 11. (26) van den Heuvel, op cit, 128-9. (27) See van den
Heuvel, op cit, 52-6. (28) Quoted in Virgil Wesley Sexton, Listening
to the Church, Nashville: Abingdon, 1971, 152. (29) See, eg. Julio
de Santa Ana, Towards a Church of the Poor, Geneva 1979. (30)
Walter Buhlmann, The Coming of the Third Church, New York: Maryknoll,
1978. (31) Elizabeth O’Connor, Journey Inward, Journey Outward,
New York: Harper & Row, 1968, 19. (32) see, eg, Donal Dorr,
Spirituality and Justice, New York: Orbis, 1984: Kenneth Leech,
The Social God, London: Sheldon, 1981; John Howard Yoder, The
Politics of Jesus, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1972: Jim Wallis, Agenda
for Biblical People, Harper & Row, 1976; Robert McAfee Brown,
Theology in a New Key, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978; Gustavo
Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, Orbis, 1973; Donald P McNeill,
Douglas A Morrison, Henri J M Nouwen, Compassion: A Reflection
on the Christian Life New York: Doubleday, 1982, John Carmody,
Holistic Spirituality, New York: Paulist, 1983; Dom Helder Camara,
Revolution through Peace, Harper & Row, 1971, Frederick Herzog,
Justice Church, Orbis, 1980; Waldron Scott, Bring Forth Justice,
Eerdmans, 1980. (33) Jurgen Moltmann, et al, Hope for the Church,
Nashville: Abingdon, 1979, 21.

(2) WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘RENEWAL’?

‘Church renewal’ is the process whereby church people,
systems and structures receive new life, meaning and power. Or,
to put it in more dramatic and dynamic terms, it is the ‘formation
of an alternative community with an alternative consciousness,
so that the dominant community may be criticized and finally dismantled.
It is the enabling of a new human beginning to be made’. (1)

Images of renewal are legion: death giving way to
life, stones to bread, creeds to Word, legalism to love, clamour
to concord, the static to the dynamic, overstanding to understanding,
shadow to substance, price to value, exploiting to caring, lust
to love, alienation to belonging, chaos to creativity. A preoccupation
with security matures into a zest for adventure; maintaining wineskins
into enjoying the wine; possibilities rather than precedents predominate.
The fire is life-giving rather than life-destroying. Fear of cognitive
dissonance is neutralized by an acceptance of ambiguity. Vested
interests become accountable again. We relish the glory of the
Mount of Transfiguration rather than wanting to build booths there.
Prayer moves from ‘wish-lists’ to contemplation, worship from
formalism to celebration, evangelism from preaching from a safe
distance to ‘sitting where they sit’.

Church renewal is more than mere innovation, the
creation of something different for the sake of change: that’s
moving the deck-chairs around on a sinking ship. Renewal is a
deep work of God in the heart and life of the individual Christian
and the Church.

The Need for Renewal

If the Holy Spirit were removed from our churches,
would their programs go on unhindered? Or, as J S Whale asks,
‘If the churches were blotted out and their buildings turned into
theatres, what, if anything, would ordinary people miss?’ (2)
What’s the difference between church-people and others, apart
from their habit of ‘going to church?’

In one sense, the Church is impregnable: the gates
of hell shall not prevail against it. But history warns that when
particular churches lose their spiritual dynamic they may disappear.
The church at Ephesus lost its first love; those at Pergamum and
Thyatira tried to accommodate to the world instead of transforming
it; the church at Sardis had a reputation for being ‘alive’ but
there was uncleanness there; the Laodiceans were wealthy, and
lukewarm. So ‘lampstands were removed from their place’ (Revelation
2 & 3). Lovelessness, secularism, immorality, complacency
– these signs of death in the church are still with us.

Renewal and Life

Suppose the risen Christ walked in judgement among
the churches of our nation, what would his verdict be? Which churches
are alive, which dead? There are signs of life and death in the
most unlikely places. Where two or three are gathered in his name,
he is there – even if that congregation was once flourishing.
On the other hand, congregations in the thousands may have a reputation
for life, but be diseased. The world may know the statistics,
but Christ alone knows whether a church is alive or dead.

Renewal and Tradition

Every human organization, including every church
and denomination, goes through developmental stages in a ‘life
cycle’. These stages have been depicted as a birth-youth- maturity-death
paradigm; (3) or as evolution (stable growth) – revolution (crisis)
stages; (4) or as a social system maturing from ‘storming to forming
to norming to performing’. (5)

The process by which religious truth and practice
is passed on from one generation to another we call tradition.
Tradition may be oral or written. Protestants (Calvinists more
than Lutherans) have been leary of ecclesiastical traditions:
they can easily become distortions of the gospel. However, even
those denominations and churches claiming adherance to ‘Scripture
alone’ develop traditions, sometimes very inflexible ones. Indeed,
as Avery Dulles has pointed out, the Bible is always read in the
light of tradition. Christianity recognizes only one absolute
authority – that of God himself. (6) ‘Renewal movements’ are essentially
attempts to get behind ‘the encrustations of tradition’ to the
esse of the Christian faith; seeking to restore authentic personal
experience of Christ through the Spirit, where this may have been
lost in the tradition.

Religious tradition is an attempt to codify ‘truth’
and behaviour, organize ritual, and categorize experience. Over
time, intellect interprets experience, which almost invariably
hardens into doctrine or dogma. Doctrine ought to be the hand-maiden
of experience, leading us back to it, but it can easily become
‘doctrinaire’. Belief-systems become carved in stone; morals become
legalisms; celebrat- ions become ritualisms. Actually there are
two dangers: religion becoming irreligious – forms and ceremonies
get in the way of a relationship with God (ie ‘idolatry’ where
forms replace the living God); or religion becoming too ‘religious’
– with ‘spaced-out’ mystics who won’t come down from the mountain.
The great saints – Teresa of Avila, Bernard of Clairvaux and the
others – were very practical people.

History is often deployed in defence of conservatism.
But serious students of history know that the only constant thing
in the past was change. Hopefully, as Francis Bacon wrote, ‘Histories
make us wise’. In any case, history teaches us that tradition
is pluriform. (7) The defence ‘It has always been done that way’
is a function of fear, not of reality. We human beings invest
an awful lot of energy avoiding reality. As T S Eliot puts it
in ‘Four Quartets’, ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality’.
In one of his apocryphal sayings Jesus says ‘He who is near me
is near the fire’. The reality is that while you have been reading
this more bodies have died of hunger than could be fitted into
your church sanctuary from the floor to the ceiling. We usually
wait till it all makes sense before we commit ourselves. The truth
is otherwise: it will only make sense once we are committed. Commitment
precedes understanding. A monk said to St. Anthony, ‘I live in
my cell, say my prayers, read the Scriptures, and weave my mat
– what else is there?’ Anthony’s response: ‘How about becoming
fire?’

Rituals are habitual behaviours associated with significant
entities in one’s existence. Every society has its rituals (eg
politeness), and rites (eg marriage ceremonies) which, as Durkheim
put it, ‘regulate, maintain and transmit from one generation to
another sentiments on which the constitution of the society depends’.
(8) Ritual, according to Malinowski, transforms anxiety into confidence.
Magic ‘ritualizes optimism’, while religion encourages people
to ‘do the biggest things they are capable of… giving them peace
and happiness, harmony and a sense of purpose… in an absolute
form.’ (9)

Every religion, every church, has its rituals. ‘Habit
formation and reformation is integral to the ordered life of the
religious community’. (10) Rituals involve motor movements (eg.
the extended arm in benediction, of the soldier’s salute), and
are measured, precise, stereotyped and often repetitive. Rhythm
and number are important (the Lord’s Supper is celebrated cyclically;
we say ‘holy, holy, holy’ three times). Spontaneity is suspended
in rituals. (11) Pagan rituals alleviate anxiety when dealing
with the awesome and the sacred. Judeo-Christian rituals are meant
to celebrate our encounter with God with joy and assurance. Religious
rituals, like any other, can be pathological or healthy. The ritualization
of worship may be a quasi- magical anxiety-reducing mechanism
‘where the radical and redemptive nature of God’s grace is not
perceived or is not really trusted’. (12) Religious rituals can
add dignity and spiritual meaning to ‘rites of passage’, which
every community celebrates as individuals move from one stage
in life to another. The French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep
identifies three kinds of rituals – rites of separation (eg betrothal),
transition (eg the Jewish Bar Mitzvah), incorporation (eg dedication
of a home or church building). These sacred or secular rites enable
individuals to separate from one station in life as they make
the transition to another, and become securely incorporated in
that new station in life. These rites may be territorial (moving
from one place to another) or social (moving from one status,
role, age group or position to another). There are recurrent themes
in rites – death/rebirth, ablution/ cleansing (eg baptism), clothing/investiture.
(13) However, habit and ritual must always be counterpointed by
spontaneity and freedom, otherwise grace is replaced by law. Ritual
is the ‘patterning’ of experience, the reenactment of the great
events of the religious community’s past. But where there is no
continuing experience of the living God rituals can be archaic
or sterile. For the neophyte, socialization involves thorough
catechizing, an initiation ceremony, then repeated explanations
of the rituals, otherwise they may seem irrelevant or even ridiculous.
As law is a tutor leading us to grace, so ritual is the structure
enhancing beauty and order in worship.

In worship, cabalistic ritual (with secret, esoteric
elements known only to the initiated few) becomes an end in itself,
desensitizing the human spirit; a valid religious ritual is a
means to the desired end of celebration of and encounter with
the living God. Pathological rituals – whether in worship or relationships
or in work – have lost touch with their object or desired end,
and become instit- utions in their own right.

Religious rituals – weddings, funerals etc., – relieve
the anxiety and insecurity of separation. Rituals, in essence,
are renewing: ‘they cushion the blow of death, they sensitize
the power of loneliness, and they provide ways of celebration…
If we did not have these rituals, we would make some. People have
always done this’. (14) So, in essence, rituals are the building-blocks
of tradition. Both ritual and tradition are useful – even necessary
– as means, but they must never be allowed to occupy the status
of ends. Traditions and rituals must provide for their own continuous
renewal: as Peter Drucker has pointed out, in a world buffeted
by change, faced daily with new threats to its safety, the only
way to conserve is by innovating. (15)

Renewal of Theology

Karl Barth told a conference at the University of
Chicago, ‘Every Christian as such is… called to be a theologian’.
(16) ‘A minister of Jesus Christ’, wrote James D. Smart, ‘in order
to fulfil his (or her) ministry properly, must be a theologian…
To be a theologian is not, first and foremost, to have at our
command all the theological learning of the ages; it is, rather,
that part of our ministry in which we deliberately expose ourselves,
our church, our preaching, to ruthless searching criticism, first
in the light of the Scriptures and then in the light of what the
church has said and done across the ages, that we may with greater
confidence and integrity speak and act in days to come’. (17)

A renewed theology is God-centred rather than human-centred,
based on knowledge of God rather than assumptions about the world,
although if it is too esoteric to apply to the human condition
it is not good theology. A renewed theology is a theology of hope
rather than of negation. It is wholistic, rather than being imprisoned
in the latest fad. (Some pastors define their theology according
to the latest theological tome they have read, and thereby become
‘theological chameleons merely reflecting the varying colors of
the theological spectrum’. (18) A renewed theology has a balance
between orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right behaviour).
(19) When theology is renewed, it finds itself living in the creative
tension between teachableness and certainty, doubt and affirmation.
According to Paul, ‘works of the flesh’ include not only perversions
of bodily desires (gluttony, sloth, lust, etc.) but all forms
of self-confidence – pride of ancestry, parentage, race, religion,
and righteousness (Philippians 3:3-6).

Renewal of Ecclesiology

Churches come in many varieties: ‘mainline’, evangelical,
fundamentalist, ‘reformed’, orthodox, pentecostal, charismatic,
‘third wave’, progressive, conservative, ethnic, confessional,
conciliar, ecumenical. Church renewal is not a shift from one
of these models to another. None of these categories represents
a ‘renewed’ church per se, although all or most had their genesis
in the renewal of a particular aspect of the church’s life.

Essentially a renewed ecclesiology focuses on Christ
rather than on the human institution we call the church; the church
is subservient to him as its Lord and Head rather than pursuing
its own goals and desires. The church is primarily viewed as a
living organism rather than as an organization. So the passionate
concern for church-members is to be holy, sanctified, cleansed,
without spot or wrinkle, blameless, truthful, righteous, peace-loving,
faithful, protected from the evil one by the word of God and prayer
(Ephesians 2:21, 5:26-7, 6:14-18), incarnating the loving character
of Christ (4:15-16), growing towards maturity in Christ (4:13),
preserving unity in the Body of Christ through loving tolerance
(4:1-6), representing Christ authentically in their behaviour
in the world (5:3-5). A renewed ecclesiology will affirm that
the whole of the church is more than the sum of its individual
parts. There are only four ‘ends’, for which a local church exists:
worship, community, formation and mission. Other church activities/structures/programs
(eg money-raising, ministries to particular groups, music, buildings,
constitutions, etc.) are means to facilitate those four ends.

A renewed ecclesiology will also take seriously the
role of the laity in ministry. As the Whiteheads put it: ‘A contemporary
shift in ecclesiology, our understanding of the nature and structure
of the church, has significantly influenced the shape of theological
reflection in ministry. Previously we have been familiar with
a church in which an individual authority (whether Catholic pope,
Episcopal bishop, or Methodist pastor) reflected on and made decisions
for the believing community. The emphasis today moves toward understanding
the community of faith as the locus of theological and pastoral
reflection. Pastoral insight and decision are not just received
in the community but are generated there as well… This shift
requires new pastoral skills – group reflection, conflict resolution,
and decision making – for the community and for its ministers’.
(20)

Renewal of the church-as-institution

The novel The Bridge on the River Kwai contains a
most telling parable. British prisoners-of-war had to construct
a bridge to facilitate the movement of enemy troops. The colonel,
to heighten morale among his men, insisted they build a bridge
they’ll be proud of. But when a higher command decides to destroy
the bridge, the colonel nearly frustrates the scheme: he had lost
the whole purpose of the war in his obsession with building a
particular physical structure.

That’s easy for church-people to do too. They become
so attached to the structures of the church – its constitutions,
its buildings, its history and traditions – they lose the total
perspective and become a hindrance to the work of the Kingdom.
The survival of the institution becomes paramount, and blocks
renewal. The New Testament is remarkably free from institutional
prescriptions: the primitive ecclesia, as Emil Brunner maintained,
is more a ‘fellowship’ than an institution.

‘While the church is, in a broad sense, an institution,
it is more fundamentally a charismatic community. That is, it
exists by the grace (charis) of God and is built up by the gifts
of grace (charismata) bestowed by the Spirit. (21) Churches, like
all societies, need institutions. But, as we said earlier, the
church’s institutional life is a means, not an end.

The New Testament metaphor of the church as a ‘new
temple’ (Acts 15:13-18; 1 Corinthians 3:10-17; 2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1,
Ephesians 2:20-22) where God dwells was borrowed from the Old
Testament. However the former temples failed to be a place of
meeting between God and his people; rather they became barriers
to meeting. But now Christ lives in his church, so the church
is the new temple of God – which is neither a material building,
nor a religious shrine, nor a localized site. This metaphor carries
four important meanings. The temple is God’s house, and Jesus
Christ is the corner stone. Second, every Christian is a ‘living
stone’ added to the building (1 Peter 2:5). Third, it has structure.
But fourth, these structures must be open to the indwelling of
the Holy Spirit (and therefore be biblically valid, culturally
viable, and temporally flexible). (22)

Renewal of Mission

Mission is the meaning of the church. The church
exists only insofar as it carries Christ to the world. The idea
of church without mission is an absurdity. (23) Vincent Donovan,
in his seminal book on mission, Christianity Rediscovered, notes
that the temptation of the church in times of crisis is to ‘react
in an inturned way’; to be hooked by the fallacy ‘be good and
the world will come to you’. (24)

Tom Allen’s The Face of My Parish hit Britain’s mainline
churches like a bombshell when it was first published in 1954.
His central thesis: ‘We are so caught up in the conventional pattern
of the church’s life, so busy keeping the wheels turning that
we find it almost impossible to experiment with new forms of life
within the church’… Mission ought not to be ‘a tip-and run affair…
an occasional or sporadic effort, but a continuous and coherent
pattern of life within the church’. (25) Any church may degenerate
from being a beacon to the world to becoming a social club with
a bit of religion tacked on on Sunday mornings. When the late
Bishop Berggrave of Norway commented on the busyness of the average
American church he got the reply, ‘Remember that churches here
are also people’s clubs.’ When things slow down we develop a new
programme or plan another mission, and settle back feeling we’ve
done something. As with the church at Laodicea, the risen Christ
stands knocking at the door, seeking entrance into the churches’
sterile life that they may be born again and have fellowship with
him in the banquet of the kingdom.

Part of the church’s failure in mission is its propensity
towards ghettoism and irrelevance, vis-a-vis the surrounding culture.
The church of North Africa was a strong missionary church, producing
many fine Christians (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine). But soon
after Augustine, that great church withered away. The fourteenth
century Nestorian Church stretched all the way from Baghdad through
India, to China and Siberia, and at its height had no fewer than
200-250 metropolitans and bishops. A century later it had all
but disappeared. Why? Both were persecuted, but other churches
have survived worse. W A Visser t’Hooft says their basic flaw
was their foreignness: neither church really belonged to the indigenous
cultures. Each was a church ‘largely linked to one particular
class, one particular language, one particular culture’. (26)

Vincent Donovan lists these essentials of authentic
cross-cultural mission:

‘To approach each culture with the respect due to
it as the very place wherein resides the possibility of salvation
and holiness and grace.

‘To approach the people of any culture or nation,
not as individuals, but as community.

‘To plan to stay not one day longer than is necessary
in any one place.

‘To give the people nothing, literally nothing, but
the unchanging, supraculutral, uninterpreted gospel before baptism.

‘To enable them to pray as Christians.

‘To leave them the Bible towards the day when they
can read it and use it as a living letter in their lives.

‘To insist that they themselves be their own future
missionaries.

‘To link them with the outside church in unity, and
the outside world in charity and justice.

‘To agree with them that baptism is indeed everything;
that the reception of baptism is the acceptance of the total responsibility
and the full, active sacramental power of the church, the eucharistic
community with a mission.

‘To encourage them to trust in the Spirit given at
baptism, and to use the powers and gifts and charisms given to
the community by the Spirit…

‘The final missionary step as regards the people
of any nation or culture, and the most important lesson we will
ever teach them – is to leave them’. (27)

The church has a two-fold purpose: to be a holy priesthood
for the world (1 Peter 2:5), and ‘to proclaim the wonderful acts
of God’ (I Peter 2:9) to the world. ‘When the joy, the certainty,
the completeness, and the beauty of a Christian community is cultivated
and communicated, evangelism is the glorious result.’ (28)

ENDNOTES

(1) Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination,
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978, 96. (2) What is the Living
Church? quoted in A. Leonard Griffith, God and His People: The
Renewal of the Church, Aldersgate, 1963, 5. (3) Gordon L Lippitt,
Organizational Renewal, New York: Meredith Corporation, 1969.
(4) Paul Hersey & Kenneth H. Blanchard, Management of Organizational
Behaviour, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977 3rd ed. (5) E Mansel
Pattison, Pastor & Parish – A Systems Approach, Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1977, 57-69. The Louis Allen Associates, an international
business consulting firm, talk about a crucial ‘corridor of crisis’/make-or-break
adolescent stage between infancy and maturity. They note that
of the 20 largest companies in the US forty years ago, only two
are still among the first twenty in size. Of the one hundred largest
companies twenty-five years ago, almost half have disappeared
or have declined substantially from their peak. Cited in Robert
D. Dale, To Dream Again, Nashville: Broadman, 1981, 20-21. Dale
also cites David O Moberg, The Church as a Social Institution,
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962, 118-124 as applying a life cycle
approach to denominations. (6) Avery Dulles, The Survival of Dogma:
Faith, authority and dogma in a changing world, Doubleday, 1973,
85. (7) See James D Whitehead and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead, Method
in Ministry: Theological Reflection and Christian Ministry, New
York: Seabury, 1983, 15 ff. (8) Quoted in Betty Scharf, The Sociological
Study of Religion, London: Hutchinson, 1973, 54. (9) B. Malinowski,
‘Science and Religion, a Symposium,’ ed. J. Huxley, 1931, quoted
in Scharf, op cit 56. (10) Wayne Oates, The Psychology of Religion,
Word, Waco, Texas, 1976, 181. (11) Paul W. Pruyser, A Dynamic
Psychology of Religion, Harper & Row, 1976, 185-6. (12) J.H.Ellens,
‘Ritual’ in Benner, op cit, 1014 ff. (13) Arnold Van Gennep, The
Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
(14) Oates, op cit, 185. (15) Peter Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow,
Harper & Brothers, chapters 1 & 2; quoted in John W Gardner,
Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society, Harper,
1963, 7. (16) Quoted by Franklin M Segler, The Christian Layman,
Nashville: Broadman, 1964, 55. (17) James D Smart, The Rebirth
of Ministry, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960, 132, 135. (18) Smart,
ibid, 137. (19) See Rowland Croucher, Recent Trends Among Evangelicals,
Sydney: Albatross, 1986, 7 ff. (20) Whitehead and Whitehead, op
cit, 5. (21) Howard Snyder, The Community of the King, Illinois:
Inter-Varsity Press, 1977, 57. (22) Howard Snyder, op cit, 141-3.
(23) J C Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out, Westminster, 1964,
42-3. (24) Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered, SCM, 1978,
104-5. (25) Tom Allen, The Face of my Parish, London, SCM, 1954,
79, 88, 86. (26) W A Visser t’Hooft, The Renewal of the Church,
SCM, 1956, 70ff. (27) Vincent Donovan, op cit, 162-3. (28) Joseph
C. Aldrich, Life-Style Evangelism, Portland: Multnomah, 1978,
21.

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