The Radical Resurgence

THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS

The key passage here is 1 Peter 2:4-9.  Peter says that believers are “being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”  The church is “a chosen people (laos, or “laity”), a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God”, called to declare the praises of him who called (it) out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

In coming to know Christ, believers became part of the body of Christ, the church. Under the high priesthood of Jesus the church itself is priesthood. In 1 Peter, the author refers to Exodus 19 where Moses was about to go up to the mountain to receive God’s law.  God said to Israel: “Now if you obey me fully, and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex.19:5-6).

The whole nation of Israel, not just the tribe of Levi, was to be God’s priesthood.  God’s plan was that his people would represent him to the world.  They would be the channel of his revelation and his salvation purposes.  This was God’s commission to Israel.  Although Israel often was unfaithful and the commission was only partly fulfilled, God’s purpose was clear.

Call it revolution or reformation – the church’s understanding of ministry is changing radically.

Ministry is in crisis today. Seminarians say they don’t feel called to the traditional pastoral role, and young men and women in pastoral service tell me. “I don’t fit here.”  A young man with a M.Div. degree, two years out of seminary, wrote, “My wife and I just don’t feel at home here. We have lots of questions about the traditional pastoral role we’re placed in, and we feel isolated.” He was serving as an assistant pastor, working closely with the senior pastor and with a group of people who know and love the Lord. But he felt something was out of focus and out of gear. He felt he was spinning wheels instead of building community.

This is not an isolated example. Several currents are combining to challenge and undermine the traditional pastoral role.  While most seminaries will operate on a professional school model (the religious counterpart to a legal or medical school), here and there that model is being challenged.  Biblical images of pastors as equippers and disciples are beginning to yeast their way into the church. On the other hand, in many local churches the expectation, both official and unofficial, is that the pastor is the professional religionist, the expert, not the equipper and catalyst.  The pastor is the one who does the religious work for the people, not the one to turns “laymen” into ministers.

Ekklesia is Supernatural

I have said that there is much going on in the ekklesia at many different levels. The ekklesia is not a phenomenon of the natural historical world only. The writer of Hebrews says that we have already been introduced into the transcendental realms, which includes participation in “the ekklesia of the firstborn ones who are enrolled in heaven” (Heb.12:23).

Think of it as polarized by the Godhead and creation. Between these poles is a great variety of interchange — many different things are going on. On any or all of these levels of dynamic interaction, the ekklesia is identified by the presence of Christ. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt.18:20).

According to philosophers and linguists there are three requirements for an adequate linguistic expression. It must be simple, complete and consistent. Here we have a simple statement — the ekklesia is constituted by the personal presence of Christ. It is complete, for He who is Himself the center of ekklesia-life is the one that “fills all in all” (Eph.1:23). And it is consistent for He that expresses His fullness through the ekklesia is genuine truth.  The presence of Christ, therefore, is an adequate expression of ekklesia. As few as two or three believers assembled together can now constitute the ekklesia.

Hence where Christ Himself is present the ekklesia exists in a totality. It does not require a composite collection of various assemblies to form the total ekklesia. Each local ekklesia is the ekklesia. Each local ekklesia is conscious of itself as the representative of the universal ekklesia (1 Thess.2:14, 1 Cor.1:2). This seems paradoxical to us — how each gathering can contain the whole ekklesia in its universality.

Phe-nom-e-non

1. An observable fact or event. 2. An extraordinary person or thing or event.

3. An outward sign of the working of a law of nature (The Merriam- Webster Dictionary)

Ekklesia

1. Assembly, as a regularly summoned political body.

2. Assemblage, gathering, meeting generally.

3. The congregation of the Israelites.

4. The Christian church or congregation (Arndt & Gingrich Greek- English Lexicon)

Let’s not use the word “church.” It has so many preconceived meanings. Also, it is not even a translation of the Greek word ekklesia. “Church” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word kirk meaning, “of or pertaining to the Lord.” A good statement about God’s people, but not an accurate translation of ekklesia.

Christianity in Crisis: A Response by Diana Butler Bass

Christianity in Crisis: A Response by Frank Viola

Christianity in Crisis: Response by Trevin Wax

The Kingdom Question

Do you long for a stronger economy? safer cities and neighborhoods? better education? more integrity in politics? more respect for traditional values? a greater respect for Christians? more godly laws? cleaner television and movies? an end to abortion, pornography homosexuality, and violence? In short, a better world?

Do these longings represent your hopes for the future? If so, why? Do you believe we as Christians have a right to expect these things from society? Do you believe that the Lord even expects His people to demand them? And if they are not forthcoming, to fight for them?

The Lord promises a new heaven and a new earth. To long for them is normal and even right. But what exactly do we have a right to expect while in this world, in its present condition – besides animosity, hostility, and tribulation, that is? Do we have a right to expect any of the societal improvements mentioned above? If so, on what Scriptural basis?

The Early Church

Do our national problems hinder anyone from exercising faith? or love? or holiness? or repentance? or from pursuing a relationship with the living God? The early church had all of our national woes times ten – and was only stronger for it. Not only that, but they exerted no energy other than fervent prayer, sincere love and faithful witness to effect a change.

Did they place their hope in a better Rome? a more righteous Galatia? a Christian Corinth? Or was their hope solely “in the grace to be revealed at the revelation of Christ Jesus” (I Pet. 1:5)? Indeed it was, and that hope is still the calling to which we must be faithful. The world’s need for moral reformation is not our mission – any more than reforming Egypt was Israel’s responsibility in the days of Moses.

Read the complete interview with Christian Smith on “The Bible Made Impossible.”

How The Institutional Church Affects The Clergy

We have now seen what, in organic nature, churches show themselves to be. Let us now look at some of the effects of the institution upon churchmen. The dependence of doctrine for stability and of religious societies for continuity upon property, tends automatically to transfer the interest of the priesthood from the superstructure of faith and communion that first attracts them to the foundation of possessions that finally holds them. The manipulation of the gods for the benefit of men gives way to the management of properties for the benefit of Mother Church….

Creed and dogma are recognized as tools merely in the aggrandizement of the ecclesiastical institutions and the fortunes of the priesthood…. The deposit of faith is handled purely as a device for the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power. Competition is suppressed not because “the faith” is true but because income is threatened. It is the most enfranchised popes that worked the Inquisition and the Index the hardest, that refuse to stir in the face of the Lutheran revolt. It took a generation and the failure of thirty years of horrible religious warfare to convince the ecclesiastical authority that its sources of income could not be restored by the customary devices of the Inquisition, the Index, the crusade and the sword….

As for the lesser and individual clergy, they are what the institution and the general community make them. The practice of their profession sets them in a fixed routine, of which to repeat interminable prayers and litanies in a strange tongue is a large part…. Habit in liturgy leads to heedlessness and boredom. The point is, to get through. “Hocus pocus” is what remains of the solemn mass with its “Hoc est corpus meus.” The Buddhist parallel is the prayer wheel. In that the mantra is brought up to the highest mechanical efficiency — every turn a prayer… Liturgy and ritual and sermons and other priestly duties are to do, and to be done with, as quickly as possible, that other more interesting and novel things may be attended to…. The problems of great churchmen are problems in the management of properties, in the care and acquisition of properties; the Catholic Church once owned as much as a third of England….

Ensuring Conformity

Churches are possessed of instruments of destruction as well as habits of appropriation. Conformity can be imposed by means of excommuni­cation and interdict, in their varying degrees. It is a mistake to imagine that those devices are obsolete…. The function of excommunications and the interdict is to cut off a person or a community from the professional services of the clergy; they are sacerdotal strikes.

The Roman Catholic Church maintains a blacklist as well. The blacklist applies to books and ideas. The ideas are studied by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition and, according to their judgment, condemned or proscribed. Books are condemned by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and public notice is given that they are placed in the Index Expurgatorius. Then, without very special permission, no faithful Catholic may read them….

All churches that attain a fixed and infallible revelation, a set of sacred scriptures whose meaning is in the custody of a specially ordained priesthood trained for the purpose and organized in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, require considerable material equipment not only to win greater power but to keep from losing ground. A customary section of this equipment is the machinery of suppressing variations, exterminating differences, keeping the revelation secure from the menace of rivalry …. Churches, as we have seen, are founded on professional priests. They rest upon the establishment of a vested interest in the art of manipulating the supernatural. The products of this art constitute a commodity that churches sell and that they seek, each in its own way, to monopolize ….

How Clergy Developed

The story of the elaboration of the arts and crafts of manipulating the supernatural is like the story of any other enterprise of man that has come down the years as an institution. You begin with a technique in which the house-mother or the house-father or the tribal headman is especially skilled. The technique is a patterned action, involving the formal use of various objects such as we have already observed to be constantly recurrent in the practice of religion. The action is accompanied by incantations, by liturgical formulas, also patterned and highly stylized….