I remember reading a book in college that suggested that the Greek civilization came up to the brink of a critical change and they blinked. What happened to the Greek civilization at a critical juncture was a failure of nerve that sent them into full retreat. In the final analysis, I believe that the church is in God’s hands, but I do worry that we may be at a critical juncture in our being the church and like the Greeks, we can either go forward or, because of a failure of nerve, we can retreat. We live in a rapidly changing and rather unstable period, and our society desperately needs what the church has to offer. As Paul said, we have the gifts in order to offer the ministry that is good news for our world, but we have to decide if we have the faith to use our gifts on behalf of the world that God loves.
Jacques Ellul, in another book I read sometime ago and forget the title of, suggested that the monks formed monasteries in the dessert, not because they were fearful of being seduced by the civilization around them, but precisely because that was where the demons that threatened the world were concentrated. We see the biblical foundation for this belief when Jesus was driven out into the wilderness by the Spirit (Mark 1:12) to be tempted by Satan. To exercise his ministry, he first had to go where the demons were active and face them directly. It took courage for the monks to go and live in the dessert and face that which threatened the world.
Not everyone is strong enough in faith to be part of the church. It is not a comfortable life. The church is where the demons reveal themselves most explicitly. The church is the nexus of where the fate of the world is being determined. Here the best and the worst wrestle for the fate of the world. Popular wisdom wrestles with the truth of Scripture. Selfishness contends with servant-hood. Hypocrisy and holiness face each other. Pride seeks to defeat prayer. Grasping confronts grace. Sinners and Saints gather in the church, often times in the same person, to shape how to respond to the world in all its hunger and vulnerability.
Of course these tensions also exist in the larger world but it is in the church that they are revealed in the most concentrated form. We come to the church not to escape the troubles of the world but to face the demons and contend with them on behalf of the world. I pray that we will not have a failure of nerve.
