GOING BACK, FAR BACK, FOR THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH

I believe that Christians need to be provoked to re-examine our practice of faith in the context of church as we have either invented it, inherited it or as we perpetuate it.

When I was a boy and throughout the early years of my own pastoral ministry career, Sunday church consisted of Sunday School classes for all ages, followed by a one hour conventional church worship service containing three hymns, beginning, middle and end, a prayer, an offering, a sermon. The sermon and the spoken Word were paramount in evangelical churches. That was it. Within evangelicalism, this model was a departure from liturgical ceremonial worship in mainline churches. Why did we do it that way?

Twenty-five years ago a contemporary worship wave began in charismatic circles and swept most evangelical churches. A team of worship leaders with guitars and drums occupied platforms and led standing congregations of worshippers in singing praise choruses for 20-30 minutes. This gave the congregation greater expressive involvement modelled by music forms they listened to every day. Why do we do it that way, still?

Some believers ask this question because for them, personally, some aspect of worship is absent, reverence, solemnity, awe, or earnestness. They must name it. Their souls long for something perhaps approximate and unmet. Finally they leave church.

They begin to think that maybe they should go back to the future.

Going back far enough takes us into the presence of Christ sitting with his disciples. He spoke about church to them. Examination reveals that church as he envisioned it was enormous and in practice it was modest, simple. Church would be an applicable term to embrace countless disciples throughout the world in every generation until the end of time. Church would meet in homes, caves, forests, prisons, refugee camps, schools, and buildings constructed by Christians specifically for their gatherings. Wherever they met they invoked the presence of God, were filled with the Spirit of God, praised the Lord Jesus Christ with muted or exuberant voices depending on circumstances, and then went forth to live by faith and to give a reason for their belief to everyone who asked them.

Maybe we should go back to the future. The trip back could become our future. Maybe it should be the future that we seek. Maybe the Church needs nothing more than to be filled with the Spirit and satisfied with Christ.