Part 1: A missing part of our thinking about church
More than once in my relatively short time in ministry, I have been involved in the process of formulating a church vision statement, a fact that in my weaker moments seems to me to confirm Paul’s words that “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution” (2 Tim 3:12). Yet although I still believe the importance of these kinds of things can be overblown, I have come to doubt the wisdom of the apparently pious objection that we should forget all this and just get on with the main things: with ministry, preaching the word, and prayer. And here is my reason: I think that behind such responses there is often a forgetfulness of something important, namely that the church is a creature.
What do I mean by this? I mean that as well as being a spiritual reality, the church is also a creaturely reality. At a basic, but important level, churches are groups of human beings, human beings who come from families, live as bodies, need food and clothing and shelter, go to work, get sick, communicate through language, and need to be organised.
The problem with this truth is that it is so mundane that it seems hardly worth mentioning, and so can be overlooked. Yet it is entirely obvious within the Bible. In the wings of the ministry of Jesus we glimpse those who supported him out of their own means (Luke 8:1–3). In the early days of the church we notice difficulties created by numerical growth, ethnic tensions, and inadequate organisational infrastructure (Acts 6:1). And in Paul’s letters we often catch sight of very normal material conditions and circumstances lying behind what he has been saying — seasons affecting travel plans (1 Cor 15:6; 2 Tim 4:21), locations for meeting (e.g. Rom 16:5), the significance of particular families within churches (e.g. Rom 16:10), sickness impeding ministry (2 Tim 4:20), communication strategies (Phil 4:16), and managing resources, “especially the parchments!” (2 Tim 4:13).
The church is a creature. It is more than a creature, of course. If that were not the case, there would be no reason to bother with Christianity at all. The church is the body of Christ, the household of faith, the fellowship of the Spirit, the bride of Christ, the pillar and bulwark of the truth! Yet notice that each one of these metaphorical descriptions has a reference to the creaturely world: to bodies, families, buildings, communities. The church is spiritual; but it is spiritual as a creature, just as Christians do not cease to be creaturely even though they also have the Holy Spirit. Yet while this truth is fairly hard to evade in relation to ourselves – we have to eat and sleep, like it or not – it is all too easily forgotten in our thinking about the church. The church is the creature of the word, which means that it is more than a creature; but it is not less.
In the following two posts we will explore a little of why this is worth remembering.
