Marks of a Dying Church.

As I read among the blogs and facebook postings from United Methodists I can see two  different ecclesiologies being expressed. They are based on different, although not contradictory, understandings of the human condition; different theological anthropologies. 

1. One theological anthropology understands humans primarily as broken, marginalized, and excluded from God’s reign. Thus the task of the church and the basis of all its ministries is to invite, welcome, include, and heal in the name of Christ. The church is a gathering of those who have been brought back into God’s Reign. In this anthropology the language of sin and sinner is understood primarily as another language of exclusion, a way of marginalizing people are pushing them away from God’s Reign.
2. A rather different theological anthropology understands humans primarily as rebels who reject God’s rule and reign. The task of the church is to place before these rebellious people Jesus Christ, who demands faith and submission to his rule. In this theological anthropology the language of sin and sinner is a necessary part of engaging people with the reality of who they really are so they can make the choice for follow Jesus Christ.

Each of these theological anthropologies can easily be supported from scripture. And the ecclesiologies that follow from them can also be supported from scripture. The problem, it seems to me, is that both, and they do need each other, are out of touch with both the range of scriptural understandings of the human person, and our contemporary culture. 

First, in the preaching of the New Testament humans are understood primarily in light of God’s Reign present in Jesus Christ. This means that the good news of what we can be always precedes any particular diagnosis of our human problems. The most prescient ecclesiology isn’t built on theological anthropology, but just theology. The Church is the Body of Christ. Yes, it bears the marks of his suffering at human hands and for human sin, but the dominant theme is his resurrection and glorification. The Church is primarily a gathering of saints, of newborns being raised toward their fantastic potential as children of God. 

Put in another way, the Church shouldn’t focus your attention on where you came from. It should be the place to discover where you are going. This is why healing, rather than diagnosis of a disease, is the first calling card of the evangelist. Jesus rejects his disciples' obsession with forensics, an obsession shared by modern United Methodist disciples. Instead he focuses on how God’s works are being revealed. (John 9:1-12)

When Peter preaches the first evangelistic sermon at Pentecost he begins with how God’s Spirit poured out will turn Israel’s children into prophets and visionaries. And that theological anthropology is rooted in Peter’s sermon in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. Jesus' suffering and death Peter acknowledges, but also dismisses with the single word “but” in Acts  2:24. 

And what about contemporary culture? When participants in contemporary culture like myself look at who we are and where we are we see an age of miracles and wonders, of unbelievable advancements in virtually even form of human well-being, from political structures to economic attainment to health and longevity. And we want to continue to make things get better and better.

Unfortunately many of our churches don't see ours as an age in which human advancement is a reality, or is even possible. Listening to the blogs and Facebook groups of the UMC what I hear is a constant whine of negative assessments of humans and human society. Humans as presented in the UM forums are unjust, bigoted, ignorant and hateful, or are victims of exclusion and marginalization broken by disease, poverty, and rejection, or are rebels determined to break God’s order in a society sliding further and further God’s intentions.

We read the Pew Reports and cluck with disapproval of ourselves as losers in the race to save society from its materialism and vacuousness. And like naked apes we fling our own excrement on ourselves and those around us in frustration over our failings to have created the kingdom of God or whatever we imagine it to be.  

We see society, local and global, is nothing but a bearer of inhuman, unjust, structures of oppression. Its driving instruments (economic and political) are handmaidens of the devil in maintaining those structures. Sectarian retreat or self-righteous martyrdom are the only options we can offer because sin and brokenness are all that we can see in ourselves and our fellow humans.

All this is the result of a culmination of cultural moments in our American society. It isn’t a necessary reading of the witness of the Bible or of reality around us. It is a Christian cultural reading because it is guided by the heavy blinders of our revivalist roots - recalling sinners to repentance - filtered through the expectation of a realized eschatology followed by our experience of losing nearly all of our status within society in the last century. 

From the beginning of the 20th century onward the impetus for creating a society that resembles the promises of God’s Reign shifted with increasing speed from the limited abilities of the Christian churches to the ever increasing capacity of science and technology to solve human problems, and of democratic governments to distribute those solutions nationally and worldwide. 

The response of the church, once it realized what was happening, has largely been resistance. Not just the fundamentalist resistance of evolutionary science, but the more widespread resistance to rational political science (as opposed to political ideologies), economics (as opposed to economic ideologies), and business and management science (as opposed to our criticism of anything touching on capitalism.)

And as the solutions to human problems moved further from our sanctuaries, being a sanctuary was all that was left to many of our churches and pastors, along with a theological anthropology of failure reflective of our contemporary American cultural sense of ourselves far more than the teaching of scripture.

And so we decline: because we offer the same old promises with less and less conviction, or even worse actually embrace ourselves as gatherings of the lost, lonely, and hopeless shaking our fists at the world, or beating our breasts in shame and finding such comfort as we can from the Big Chill of a dying American dream. It is small wonder so many of us embrace the Old Testament prophets. Like them we've given up on this present age, have embraced our exile, and now hope only to maintain a righteous remnant until the Lord returns or the righteous control congress and the Whitehouse. Its likely to be a long wait whatever your eschatology. 

It is worth, I think, at least considering the implicit ecclesiology of hope that we find in churches (including UM churches) that are growing. For it seems to me these churches offer the immediate promise of experience God’s life-changing Spirit, preach and teach the potential of humans to achieve great things for God, and offer forward looking paths of discipleship toward all the goodness of God’s Reign. 

And that I think, is what we find in the Bible. There, as we look at the first Church, the first enacting of what it means to be the Body of Christ, we find a gathering of disciples that burst into the world believing they could outrun God's judgment in reaching to the ends of the earth. They were not, in this sense, Wesleyans. They were not fleeing the wrath to come.  In stead they were the vanguard of redemption. And that is a movement worthy of being call Church. That is a movement for a living Church.