If we follow the statistics for the past several decades—of the numbers of members, worshippers, youth, children, churches—it would seem the Presbyterian Church in Canada is dying. This has been the source—not only in the PCC but the church at large—of many studies and reports, and there’s a great deal of anxiety about it. But, perhaps there is something to be gained through our journey toward death. This is what I’d like to explore.
If we follow the narrative of scripture, we are challenged to believe and then think through the crazy idea that there can be new life through our dying; perhaps even a better life. It’s called resurrection life. The apostle Paul, for one, is quite clear that the new life is even better than the old. He proclaims that the journey through death can be transforming in ways we could never imagine or bring about without the dying. How so?
THE OLD VISION
Let us begin with the popular view of how to think and do church successfully. For the past 1,700 years or so, we have equated numbers with success. The more people in the pews, the more God’s providence and blessing is with us. Somehow if we have larger and larger numbers of people who also bring money, we presume it must be the Spirit’s work and therefore God is smiling upon us. If we’re not increasing this way, then we presume we are dying and God’s Spirit is not working among us. Unless we grow and grow quantitatively, we cannot be “viable,” “successful” or “healthy.”
And we cannot shake this sort of thinking: whether we think of other parts of the world where Christianity is booming, or our part of the world where megachurch or “ethnic” church numbers can seem so awe-inspiring, the vision is more or less the same. Quantitative growth is seen as a sign that God is working. And unless this is happening, we cannot imagine serious success, health or viability for our churches. Thus, we focus on worship styles, musical styles and programs designed to draw in spiritual consumers who will not only attend but commit their resources so we can grow bigger and more financially secure.
Such a vision of success in one form or another has been around since the time Christianity became the biggest religious show in town (from the fourth century onward). With large grants of real estate, official recognition (which also meant prohibiting the alternatives) and lots of money, Christianity triumphed over all other competitors to become the dominant religion of the growing Roman empire that spread across Europe and, through colonization, across the world.
Now, there have also been times of persecution, ascetic discipline and poverty in desert and monastery, missionary struggle and even martyrdom over the past 2,000 years we’ve been church. But the dominant way of interpreting such suffering and death has been like Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, as “heroic.” Persecuted martyrs, ascetic saints and missionary heroes and heroines of the faith can fuel church triumphalism as much as large, new cathedrals and the enthusiasm of masses of people with lots of money. We need heroes and heroines in one form or another because they energize and inspire us to fight and win.
Our North American church’s version of triumphalism today may be different on the surface than the Christendom of the past, but not in theology. Unlike our European and colonial past, we separate church and state, respect the free choice of individuals in matters of faith and accept that we are not the only religious show in town. We have to compete in a new way in order to win. But winning still looks the same. We know what we must do to be viable. We have to grow, grow, grow. And growth may be about many things, but without new members who bring lots of money, it’s pretty empty in the end. We have given in to the very temptations Jesus resisted for himself in the wilderness (Matthew 4). We have got Paul and the New Testament idea of church totally wrong.
A NEW VISION
New visions don’t come from sitting around talking about them from a place of comfort. Rather, they come when challenges press in upon us and we’re backed into a corner. If we’re not stuck in demoralization, panic or denial, a new vision may be born. Paul had many challenges press in upon him. The churches he was responsible for were not always spiritually healthy. They struggled with division, spiritual competitiveness, exclusion, elitism and moral disorder. On top of that Paul had to deal with other leaders in the church who questioned his authority and status as an apostle. The two letters to the church in Corinth are a perfect example of this.
The Corinthian church was a success as far as statistics were concerned. But according to the apostle, their way of life as a community was deeply flawed for all their quantitative success. In fact, their whole focus on success, and the kind of success patterned after the world around them, was the biggest obstacle to being a true church of Jesus Christ. The Corinthians were captivated by the desire to increase their status among each other and this led to competitiveness and elitism. They were hungry for importance and significance. They wanted to be heroic and triumphant. This came out in all kinds of ways and the net result was a failure to love each other, especially those who did not promote their social status and success within the community. This is the very focus of Paul’s famous hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13.
Psychologically, this hunger to be successful may be due to the circumstances out of which many of the Corinthian Christians emerged. Paul reminds them in the opening chapter of the first letter that “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” But given their hunger to measure up to worldly standards of success, status and triumph, they even turn against Paul. By the second letter the Corinthians seem to have outgrown him because they feel he is not as shining and spectacular a leader as they hoped he would be, whereas other leaders seem to outperform him in charisma and style.
Instead of boasting his credentials, however, Paul’s very vantage point of humiliation opens him up to discern a deeper revelation in the humiliation of Christ crucified as the glory of God. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are …” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). It is not their success that makes them blessed by God, but the crucified peasant they worship that gives them their true life. He is their “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption”
(v.30). To the world such an idea is the height of lunacy, foolishness and the biggest of stumbling blocks to attracting the powerful and successful into Christian community.
If powerful and successful people want to join the church and be part of it because it’s the popular, hip, cool place to be, maybe something is wrong. Only when we encounter Christ as a judgment of the world’s glory, in the church or elsewhere, can we trust that the God we worship is the God revealed in the crucified peasant from Nazareth. He is risen, yes, but risen to a glory very different than what the world knows and appreciates. He is risen to the glory of servant love, not self-expanding love.
According to Paul, this message is not just for the church. It is a message for Paul himself. He responds to the “super-apostles” (referred to in 2 Corinthians) who challenge his leadership gifts and charismatic ability by referring to his weakness. Whatever Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was about (2 Corinthians 12:7), it made him look and feel weak. But suffering this humiliation opened him up to a different kind of strength. It inspired him to boast not in himself (since he was discredited in the eyes of many according to social standards of success), but in the power of God to transfigure weakness into a different kind of strength.
Such strength hidden beneath apparent weakness revealed a different, richly authentic quality of love, a capacity to build bridges between great divides among people, a capacity to inspire genuine non-competitive communion. Such communion is rooted in a recognition and trust that God is the energy and source of our life, not our own human gifts, ingenuity, creativity, techniques or intelligence. As long as the world sees the church as a failure, the church has a chance to be a real success from God’s point of view. Once the world dictates the terms for success, God is sidelined, at least the God revealed on a bloody cross. This is Paul’s conviction.
The apostle challenges us with the idea that if we preach the true gospel, the gospel of a crucified peasant who is a “stumbling block” and “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23) rejected by the glitz and glitter of our world, it’s not going to be the kind of message that will be attractive to the powerful and successful of our world.
The first step toward a new vision for our church, then, is to purge ourselves of our desire to be successful, influential or significant. Only then will the door open to a different kind of strength, authenticity and identity: as spiritual members of the crucified peasant from Nazareth, risen to rule with a mysterious, sovereign strength hidden beneath what the world sees as weakness and failure—dying.
