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Robert Thornton Henderson is one of the founders of PFR and former Director of the Seminary Ministry, is the author of a number of books, most recently Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church (Wipf and Stock, 2006) that is in the form of a dialogue with a cautious young adult on the authenticity of the church.

Maybe being now an octogenarian gives to me the privilege of also being something of a contrarian, or maybe even the obligation to wax a bit prophetic in the vein of Jeremiah 1:10 (“to pluck up and break down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plan”) - something like that.  We’ve been talking a whole lot in recent years (especially since the influence of Lesslie Newbigin became so prominent) about the “missional” church.  We’ve had conferences and new organizations promoting this as the clue to reviving the fading influence of the Church.

But then, I’m old enough to recall that for the near sixty years of my pastoral leadership in the church we have averaged some new messianic movement that would bring “revival” or “renewal” about once every ten years at least: methods of evangelism, Bible study programs, small group focus, all kinds of spiritual formation disciplines, on and on.  The waning of the Church’s influence, however, continues (with provocative exceptions).  Barna estimates some huge number of ‘born again Christians’ who find the Church irrelevant to their lives and don’t even attend.  And the woods are full of folk who have been so burned by, or disillusioned with the Church that they are allergic to any approaches to it.

And now, here we are, talking about the “missional” Church in this complex post-Christian and post-modern North American culture with all of its components of liminality.  If we are serious about seeing the Church become truly “missional,”  then we have a conceptual hurdle of seemingly Himalayan proportions.  For the past millennium and a half we have operated with a default ecclesiology that is post-Constantinian rather than biblical and subversive to the core of the Church’s missional character.

For a denominational tradition that professes to be “reformed and ever being reformed according to the Word of God” we have drifted a long way into an understanding of the Church that certainly doesn’t come from New Testament documents.  When Jesus told his disciples at Caesarea Philippi that he would build his church, and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it, he left it right there.  He would only give them a commission to “go make disciples” and to baptize them and to teach them all that he had commanded: no structure, no plan for a human institution, no call for worship services, or clergy, or choirs, or youth programs, only an enigmatic promise that, when the Holy Spirit came upon them, the disciples would be equipped and empowered to engage in Jesus’ self-same mission of proclaiming and demonstrating the Kingdom of God as was his.

So what you get early on, after Pentecost, is a missionary movement that took on communal form as it went along.  “The word went everywhere.”  Multitudes were converted.  Deacons were running off to the next city and initiating a Kingdom witness and a Kingdom community.  Not only apostles, mind you: everybody.  Christian communities sprang up in unexpected places across the landscape in the face of rather stout cultural and political opposition.  It was contagious!  It was like leaven (sound familiar?).  Yet there are very few clues about exactly how this happened, unless you factor in the dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit equipping every member to be a significant part of the mission (we’ll come back to that).  This remarkable pattern of missional growth goes on until the Christian Church became one of the dominant influences in a declining Roman Empire, often in the face of fierce opposition by that very empire.

So what happened to subvert such a movement?

In the fourth century the emperor Constantine was converted (ostensibly rather dramatically) to the Christian cause.  And, as a convert, he legitimized the Christian faith and set about to give it status (no favor, this!).  The problem was that Constantine, being Roman, assumed any self-respecting religion had to have all of the accoutrements the pagan religions had, (temples, clergy, choirs, liturgies, incense, etc.)  And, I’m quite certain that after several centuries of being aliens, being persecuted, and having little security, such new status probably sounded pretty cool.  The problem was it wasn’t cool.  It was a major subversion of the nature and mission of the Christian movement.  There is no New Testament warrant for sanctuaries, clergy set apart by dramatic ordination ceremonies, elegant worship services, liturgies performed by a priestly class, or even, alas, sacraments.

And when Justinian, in the seventh century, made Christianity the official religion of the empire it was all pretty much set in concrete.  The Church became a “place” to which you went rather than a “movement” of missional obedience.  The pastoral gift was redefined from a teaching necessity that equipped all of God’s people for their 24/7 engagement in the mission into a custodial function which cared for passive laity.  The Church had been subverted from a missionary movement that took on communal form in its mission to an institution that had a missionary dimension that required, too often, officially ordained missionaries.  A case can even be made that infant baptism emerged formally out of this so that to be baptized into the Church made you an official citizen of the empire, and vice-versa.

We have come to speak of this subverted understanding of the Church as “Christendom.”  The Christendom Church, among other things, makes an identity between Church and empire.  The empire makes the Church its chaplain, and the Church becomes captive to the values and agendas of the empire (divine right of kings, Bible and flag—that sort of thing).  While this is convenient, it is also highly subversive of the Church’s counter-cultural, salt and light vocation.
And, alas, the Church then becomes humanly explainable: the Holy Spirit hardly a necessity.

We’ve received a whole alternative understanding of the Church (ecclesiology) that has been in place now for a millennium and a half, built upon this subverted understanding of the Church. Let me hasten to say, this doesn’t mean that the ascended Lord Jesus has been stymied.  Oh, no!  Jesus has always been building his church, but it has been through ‘end-runs’, spontaneous underside movements, and unofficial acts of missional obedience.  As the late Harold Kurtz often reminded us, the gospel has always been “out of control.”

So here we are talking about re-conceiving of the Church as “missional,” but trying to figure how to do it within a Christendom ecclesiology.  It can’t work.  What’s the answer?  Can we get over this radical subversion, this “Himalayan” hurdle?  Is there the contemporary will to do it? 

Let me propose a couple of things: 1) Re-founding the Church on its New Testament foundations, and 2) re-claiming the charismatic furnishing of the missional community by the Holy Spirit as so clearly displayed in the New Testament.  But be careful; this will call into question a good deal of what we accept as “normal” in our present Christendom institutions (and our Presbyterian Book of Order).

I like the term “re-founding” which comes, actually, from one of the early missional church resources by a Maryknoll priest, Gerald Arbuckle.  Father Arbuckle is a cultural anthropologist who was assigned by his order to determine why the Order was declining so markedly.  He came to the conclusion that, whenever an “order” (translate: congregation, denomination, or Church) dilutes, displaces, or forgets its “founding myth,” its original reason for being, it reverts to chaos.  Father Arbuckle goes on to say that it is not enough to talk about reviving or renewing an order, what is needed is a radical “re-founding” of that community upon its “founding myth.” 

Let this old contrarian, then, propose that we need to go back to our biblical and pre-Constantinian roots, and reclaim our essence as a missionary movement that only takes on communal form as it obeys.  We need to know why the Church exists, and how it is essential to the gospel enterprise.  In so doing we will, of necessity, have to deal with all of the Christendom forms upon which we have become so dependent, and which are now in their twilight. 

Secondly, we need to return to the New Testament teachings about the awesome gifts of the Holy Spirit, gifts given to every believer for the common good.  There were household gifts, equipping gifts, and oversight or leadership gifts.  These gifts included very practical gifts such as administration and helps.  But there were also miraculous gifts of healing, miracles, praying in tongues, etc.  Sound Pentecostal?  OK, but it is also, and unavoidably, the clue as to how the Church as a missional movement was equipped by the Holy Spirit to practically and effectively carry out its impossible mission.  Also, returning to these gifts makes the Church a humanly unexplainable phenomenon once again.

Look only at Ephesians 4 and you will find four gifts mentioned (if you consider the pastor-teacher as one gift, as I do) that were all necessary to “equip God’s people for the work of ministry.”  They do not create a “Minister of the Word and Sacrament” as the Christendom Church has so often done with convoluted interpretation. No!  Every one of God’s people must be equipped with apostolic (missionary), prophetic (discerning context and realities), and evangelistic (at the very least engagement in conversations with those Jesus came to seek and to save) capacities.  Then the teaching shepherd, or pastor-teacher, equips others in the Word of Christ so that the Word can dwell within the community richly, by which God’s people have the capacity to exhort and minister to one another (cf. Colossians 3:16-17).  These four gifts are symbiotic and interdependent.  But that’s worthy of a whole study in itself.

That’s my prophetic word.  I would commend to you one of the major resource books of the missional church folk: The Shaping of Things to Come, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch; or, more classically, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (especially the last several chapters) by Lesslie Newbigin, the giant figure in the missional church movement; or, if you really want to go radical, The Subversion of Christianity, by Jacques Ellul.  But be warned: becoming a missional church is not a programmatic choice for the next year or so.  The re-founding hurdle that stands between where most congregations are currently and a truly missional Church is of Himalayan proportions.

Peace!