A New Kind of Church for a New Kind of World, by Frank Viola

Editor Introduction: Postmodernism, The Church, and The Future

From Pneuma Review Summer 2008

The modern era has past us by. Modernism stood in stark contradiction to the Christian faith. It asserted that man’s scientific and objective knowledge could save the problems of the world. God wasn’t necessary.

In fact, according to the tenants of modernism, God didn’t even exist. Why? Because modernism arrogantly taught that only that which can be verified by the physical senses could be trusted. Since God stands outside the realm of the physical senses, His existence could not be proven, thus there was no rational reason to believe in Him.

Modernism is all but gone, and it failed to deliver its promises. It did not solve the problems of the world. In fact, with the creation of nuclear and biological weapons, it made it far easier to destroy the world it claimed to save.

Enter the postmodern world.

In many ways, postmodernism is much more friendly to the Christian faith than its predecessor which denied the spiritual world.

Postmodernism is difficult to define. Pundits, professors, and philosophers disagree on its precise meaning. Nevertheless, here are some of the basic characteristics of the postmodern mind.

1. Experience, personal testimony, and spiritual encounter are more persuasive than objective, logical argumentation.

2. Authentic relationships, connectedness, and community are more appealing than Western individualism and rugged independence.

3. A humble attitude that respects and gives an open ear to the views of others is more attractive than the conceited claims of those who say they are completely right and everyone else is wrong.

Intolerance, racism, sexism, bigotry are all rejected in favor of love, respect, and concern for others regardless of the outward barriers that separate us humans.

The Church in the Postmodern World

What is needed is a new kind of church for a new kind of world.

Interestingly, the new kind of church I’m speaking of is really not new at all. It’s the church that we find in the New Testament. Unfortunately, through centuries of religious tradition, the modern church has departed from its Biblical roots.

When the church acts according to its true nature, instead of by human tradition, it becomes a powerful witness to the reality of Jesus Christ to postmodern people. It gives them what they long for—the very things that modernism failed to deliver.

In this article, I will describe the shape of the church that will meet the demands of the postmodern world. That shape can be described in four dimensions. While an entire book can be dedicated to unfolding each dimension, in this piece, I simply wish to give a brief description of each one.

The four dimensions are: Communion, Corporate Display, Community Life, and Commission.

Communion

The communion dimension of the church has to do with the church’s inward life and its relationship to the Christ who indwells it.

God in Christ dwells within the church by the Holy Spirit. That’s not simply a doctrine or theology. It’s a reality.

As the Bride of Christ, the church is called to commune with, love, enthrone, and intimately know the heavenly Bridegroom who indwells her.

Churches that excel in the communion dimension give time and attention to spiritual fellowship with the Lord. Worship is a priority. Seeking the Lord, loving Him, communing with Him, and encountering Him are central.

The means of communion are many; including prayer (in all of its forms), meditation, contemplation, worship through song, taking the Lord’s Supper, interacting with the Lord through Scripture, etc. Such means are not only to be practiced by individual members, but by the church corporately and/or in small groups.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where many Christians do not know the Lord very well. This is true even among those who believe in and practice spiritual gifts. The Corinthian church is a testament to the fact that a person can operate in spiritual gifts, and yet have a very shallow walk with the Lord.

Jesus Christ can be known deeply. And the church is called to live by the life of Christ. The communion dimension makes such living a concrete reality. In fact, the communion of the church can be seen as the engine that drives all of the church’s activities. And it is a witness to the postmodern world that God is alive and well, being actively known, encountered, and experienced by His people.

Corporate Display

The church is called to gather together to display the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ. How? Not by “church services” where a few people perform before a passive audience. But in “church meetings” where every member of the Body functions, ministers, and expresses the Lord Jesus in an open-participatory atmosphere (see 1 Cor. 14:26; Heb. 10:24-25, etc).

Christ dwells in every Christian and can inspire any of us to share something that comes from Him with the church. In the first century, every Christian had both the right and the privilege of speaking to the community.

The open-participatory church meeting was the common gathering of the early church. Its purpose? To edify the entire church and to display, express, and reveal Christ through the members of the Body to principalities and powers in heavenly places (Eph. 3:8-11).

Today, many churches are stuck with the traditional church service where a few people minister to a largely passive audience. But such services do not display Christ through the every-member functioning of His Body.

Equally so, they suppress the headship of Christ, because He is not leading the meeting. Instead, human headship directs what happens, who participates, and when.

Such “services” embody the doctrine of “the priesthood of some believers” rather than the Biblical vision of the priesthood of all believers.

I’ve written elsewhere on this in great detail, particularly in my book Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Practices (Frank Viola and George Barna, Tyndale, 2008). Suffice it to say that every church should have a venue for the free-yet-orderly functioning of the Body where Jesus Christ (and not a human being) is the functional Head of the meeting.

Through such meetings, the Headship of Jesus is made visible and the whole church is built up.

Postmodernism puts a high premium on the participation of the many, rather than the professionalism of the few. For this reason, churches that operates according to New Testament principles in their gatherings are far more appealing than the traditional model where a few are active and the rest are passive.

Community Life

Properly conceived, the church is a colony from heaven that has descended on earth to display the life of God’s Kingdom.

By its way of life, its values, and its interpersonal relationships, the church lives as a countercultural outpost of the future Kingdom—a Kingdom that will eventually fill the whole earth “as the waters cover the sea.”

God’s ultimate purpose is reconcile the universe under the Lordship of Jesus Christ (Col. 1:20; Eph. 1:10). As the community of the King, the church stands in the earth as the masterpiece of that reconciliation and the pilot project of the reconciled universe. In the church, therefore, the Jewish-Gentile barrier has been demolished as well as all barriers of race, culture, sex, etc. (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 2:16). The church lives and acts as the new humanity on earth that reflects the Community of the Godhead.

Thus when those in the world see a group of Christians from different cultures and races loving one another, caring for one another, meeting one another’s needs, living against the current trends of this world that give allegiance to other gods instead of to the world’s true Lord, Jesus Christ, it is watching the life of the future Kingdom lived out on earth in the present.

It is this “Kingdom community” that turned the Roman Empire on its ear. Here was a people who possessed joy, who loved one another deeply, who made decisions by consensus, who handled their own problems, who married each other, who met one another’s financial needs, and who buried one another.

The church’s allegiance was exclusively given to the new Caesar, Jesus Christ, and she lived by His rule. As a result, the response by her pagan neighbors was, “Behold, how they love one another!”

We live in a day when the Western Church has enshrined rugged individualism and independence. As such, many modern churches are not authentic communities that are embodying the family of God. Instead, they are institutional organizations that operate as a hybrid of General Motors and the Rotary Club.

The spiritual DNA of the church will always lead its members toward authentic, viable community. It will always lead Christians to live a shared life through the Holy Spirit that expresses the life and values of Jesus Christ.

In this way, the church becomes the visible image of the Triune God. By sharing in the communion of the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, the church puts God’s love on public display.

Postmodern people long for authentic community. Only the church of Jesus Christ can fulfill this need. Human community, without God as its centrality, is a counterfeit that’s guaranteed to fail.

Commission

Another unique characteristic of the church from the first century through the fifth was that it not only cared for its own, but it cared for the world that surrounded it.

The pages of history are filled with stories of how the early Christians took care of the poor, stood for those who suffered injustice, and met the needs of those who were dying by famine or plague. In other words, the early Christian communities cared for their non-Christian neighbors who were suffering.

Not a few times a plague would sweep through a city, and all the pagans left town immediately, leaving their loved ones to die. That included the physicians. But it was the Christians who stayed behind and tended to their needs, sometimes even dying in the process.

One of the Roman emperors, a pagan, publicly lamented that the pagan temples were losing customers because “the Christians not only take care of their own needy, but ours as well!”¹

The book of Acts and the epistles of Paul, Peter, James, and John abound with examples and exhortations of how the church cared for the world. This particular theme is peppered throughout the New Testament documents. (Quoting all those texts would demand another article.)

In short, the early church understood that she was carrying on the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. She well understood that He was the same today, yesterday, and forever (Heb. 13:8).

That ministry is enunciated in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And again in Acts 10:38, “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.”

Throughout His ministry, Jesus showed what the Kingdom of God was all about by loving outcasts, befriending the oppressed, healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, caring for the poor, driving out demons, forgiving sins, etc.

If you peel back His miracles, the common denominator underneath them all is that He was alleviating human suffering and showing forth what the future Kingdom of God looked like.

When Jesus did His miracles, He was indicating that He was reversing the effects of the curse.

In Jesus’ ministry, a bit of the future had penetrated the present.

Jesus embodied the future Kingdom of God where human suffering will be eradicated and there will be peace, justice, freedom, and joy.

The church, which is His Body in the world, carries on this ministry. It stands on the earth as a sign of the coming Kingdom. The church lives and acts in the reality that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the world today. It lives in the presence of the future . . . in the-already-but-not-yet of the Kingdom of God.

For this reason, the church is commissioned to proclaim and embody the Kingdom now … to bring a bit of the new creation into the old creation … to bring a piece of heaven into the earth … demonstrating to the world what it will look like when God is calling the shots. In the life of the church, God’s future has already begun.

The commission of the church has to do with how she displays the Christ who indwells her to those outside of her. It has to do with how she expresses Christ to the world. Jesus fulfilled the mission of Israel in His earthly ministry. But since His resurrection, He has commissioned the church to continue that mission. How does the church do this?

By communing with the God who indwells her and living by His life. By edifying one another by the corporate display of Jesus Christ in her meetings. And by living as the community of the King with one another. By accepting her commission, the church expresses God’s image and exercises His authority in the earth—the very things that the first Adam was commissioned to do in the garden.

A church that fulfills its Divine commission is an undeniable testimony to postmodern people that Jesus Christ is in fact Lord of the world and His coming kingdom is a certain reality.

Conclusion

It is extremely rare to find a church that is operating in all four dimensions. Most churches excel in one or two of them. And sadly, they often pit one dimension against the other.

For instance, those who chiefly stress the first dimension (communion) are often tagged “contemplatives” or “quietists.” Those who stress the last dimension (commission) are often tagged “activists.”

Stressing one dimension to the exclusion of the others will inevitably create a lopsided, imbalanced group of Christians.

Example: if a church neglects the communion dimension, its activities in the commission dimension will be the work of human energy and ingenuity. It will not be the work of God.

By the same token, if a church focuses all its attention on the communal dimension, it will become an ingrown, insular, and (often) sectarian group of Christians that has no impact on the surrounding culture.

In short, it would please the Lord and advance His Kingdom if every church would seek to walk in all four dimensions. Therein lies the key to fulfilling God’s eternal purpose.

Exploring the practicals through which a church can flesh out all four dimensions is another discussion altogether. But it wouldn’t hurt if those churches that stress one or two dimensions would dialogue with those who stress the others. And in this way we can learn from one another.

Then, perhaps, the church of Jesus Christ will more effectively deliver the gospel to those who are searching for reality in our postmodern world. So it seems to me anyway.

PR

Notes
¹ Quoted in Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton University Press, 1996), page 84.