This change in the authority of the church can be very frustrating to those who have devoted their lives to the church. They worry that in the process of change much that is of value is being lost. Yet there is a sense that an almost inevitable change is taking place. When you look at the flow of change, it is as if some force greater than the church is operating on the church from outside it.
As faithful people who seek to understand what God is doing, this should cause us to ask some Biblical questions. What is God doing? Is the church experiencing punishment for disobedience? What will be lost in this wilderness crossing before we arrive at the Jordan? Will we have the courage to cross the Jordan after we have heard the report of the spies as to the challenges ahead of us? What is the shape of the promised land in the church’s future?
Such changes do not happen at an even pace. There are certainly many signs of where these changes have been resisted at least for a time. There are still many members who continue to find the church and what it offers as critical to their lives. Some of the large mega-churches have been very successful at becoming the center of their members lives. In addition to providing for their members spiritual needs, they also offer a parallel education to that of the public schools, meet their people’s entertainment needs, offer housing, provide restaurant services, interpret the news, and most of the other services that are deemed a necessity in our society.
Even the power of the clergy is only partially diminished in many people’s church experience. Loren Mead provides an effective analysis of the many ways the clergy still runs the church. As clergy we continue to be looked to for the official interpretation of Scripture. We still dominate the decision making of our higher judicatories. Many decisions in the local church still seek our support if they are going to succeed . (Five Challenges, Mead, ppl 5-10) Yet the changes continue to occur, the most dramatic of which is that an increasing number of people are opting out of the church as it is currently configured.
If God is sovereign in God’s world, how are we to understand what is happening to the church in our time. If the temptations that Jesus experienced as recorded by Matthew are also the temptations of the Body of Christ, then the church must resist meeting the world as the guardian of bread, miracles or political power. Like Jesus, the church can offer bread to the hungry, miracles to the suffering and contend with the powerful when they are oppressing others but such power is not used to strengthen the church but only to serve the needy.
Like Jesus, the church approaches the world in weakness as the humiliated Christ. We approach the world as servants without the protective facade of being the possessors of the only means of salvation. Even if we affirm that Jesus is the way, the truth,and the life, we know that Jesus did not approach people from the position of power, threatening them with the denial of salvation to get their attention. Rather, he came responding to their needs and offering them the power of God’s forgiveness and love. The church has the opportunity to witness to that same servant ministry as it approaches those in the world. It comes not with what it can deny the world but with what it can offer the world in God’s name. What I am suggesting is the possibility that the church is offered the opportunity of meeting the world in weakness in the same way that its Lord chose to do.
