The Living Church – Part 1

For my birthday I received a gift card to a local Christian Bookstore so I went and picked out a few books. The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor by John Stott (IVP, 2007) seemed like a good buy.

I respect John Stott as a doctrinally sound thinker enough to want to hear (read) what he has to say about these changing church times.  He is uniquely qualified as a worker for renewal and reform within the Church of England, not taking the easy road of separation, nor the easy road of compromise. His is a voice that speaks with authority backed by his near 90 years of life experience most of which as a Christian and Evangelical Preacher.

The book is framed utilizing 9 patterns identified in the analysis by Gibbs and Bolger called Emerging Churches (SPCK, 2006). These patterns make up the topic chapters of the book.

Chapters Are:

1. Essentials: God’s Vision for His Church
2. Worship: Glorying in God’s Holy Name
3. Evangelism: Mission Through the Local Church
4. Ministry: The Twelve and the Seven
5. Fellowship: The Implications of Koinonia
6. Preaching: Five Paradoxes
7. Giving: Ten Principles
8. Impact: Salt and Lght
9. Conclusion

I am hoping to provide a review of each chapter in subsequent posts.

Stott also highlight 3 specific ‘core’ patterns:

1. Identifying with the life (or way) of Jesus
2. Transforming Secular Space – rejecting the sacred-secular (dualism) divide
3. Living as Community

Stott notes these are nothing new to the church, but modernism has done much to interfere and erode these core patterns which are historically essential characteristics of any healthy, growing, effective church.

Stott compares Modernism and Postmodernism in simple terms:

Modernism: Proclaims the cold objectivity of science and reason
Postmodernism: Prefers the warmth of subjective experience

Modernism: Committed in the quest for truth believing certainty is possible
Postmodernism: Committed to pluralism, affirming the equal validity of all ideologies, and tolerance as the supreme virtue

Modernism: Declares the inevitability of social progress
Postmodernism: Pricks the bubble of Utopian dreams

Modernism: Exalts self-centered individualism
Postmodernism: Seeks the togetherness of community

Modernism: Supremely self-confident, often guilty of that arrogant ambition the Greeks called hubris.
Postmodernism: Humble enough to question everything, for it lacks confidence in anything.

In my own thinking I have not arrived at the conclusion that modernism and postmodernism are historical periods, but rather coincided through history when ever there are cultural chasms between one generation and the next. Stott seems to support that with the description of postmodernism being a parasitic attachment to modernism. The church of the 50’s struggled with the new rebellion then struggled with the hippie dropouts of the 60’s and70s until there was a rise of postmodernistic tendencies that rejected modernism and became culturally at war with it. Much like Stott is describing.

My observation is the church leadership of the Jesus Movement which reacted against the modernistic traditionalist has  morphed from their energizing and freeing flexibility in reaching the culture with the Gospel it could uncompromisingly give on the cultures own terms  into a modernistic hostile unchangableness which demands that the current culture meet the church on the church’s terms to receive the Gospel. Oddly enough they are becoming like those they broke away from. Historically this over and over proves true.

What has precipitated this avalanche of books [emergent, Purpose Driven, etc] is the sense that the church is increasingly out of tune with contemporary culture, and that unless it comes to terms with change, it faces extinction. Of course it will not die…. Yet alarming statistics warns us of the current crisis, and the language of “seismic” change enforces the situation.

It is not that the church’s calling is to ape the world, for it is called rather to develop a Christian counterculture. At the same time, we must listen to the world in order to be able to respond to them sensitively, though without compromise.

I am interested to see where he goes in some of these topics and his call for more established R.C. churches, not Roman Catholic…

…but for Radical Conservative churches – “conservative” in the sense that they conserve what Scripture plainly requires, but “radical” in relation to that combination of tradition and convention which we call “culture.”  Scripture is unchangable; culture is not. The purpose of this book is to bring together a number of characteristics of what I will call an authentic or living church, whether it calls itself “emerging” or not. I hope to show that these characteristics, being clearly biblical, must in some way be preserved.