The Problem with the Church
The problem is not error. The problem is we stopped growing.
Cessation of Transformation
A major problem with the church is not error or sin induced by cultural influences, but its failure to continue growing in maturity. The real problem is not returning to tradition or getting back to the Bible; it is addressing why cultural influences can distort faith at all. Once we come to faith, how can culture distort that faith? True faith, once found, is far more satisfying than our past life. Is it because we are inherently sinful? Or is it a little more complex than that?
I can count on one hand how many theologians and pastors seriously factor into their spiritual lives and theology 2 Corinthians 3:18 — that by the beholding of God’s glory we are being transformed from one degree to another into the image of Christ by the Spirit — a very central passage in Paul’s theology. They simply throw it into the closet with the other Scriptural skeletons.
Why does the Church work so hard to avoid this idea of ourselves being constantly transformed throughout our lives, and of the Church being transformed throughout history? They avoid it because it is a dangerous passage, and it exposes their weakness. In its spiritual and relational impotence, the Church cries: return to the Bible; release ourselves again to the free moving of the Spirit; get back to the doctrine and understanding that set this denomination apart from all the others; get back to the mission statement with which our church started.
If we acquire Christlikeness through an endless series of transformations, then there is nothing to go back to. Stasis itself is eventually destructive of the faith.
If we acquire Christlikeness through an endless series of transformations by the work of the Spirit, pulling us deeper into greater fullness of life, then there is nothing to go back to; in fact, stasis itself is eventually destructive of the faith. We are called to a faith in which a primary characteristic is growth — ongoing transformations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues:
The transformation into the divine image will become ever more profound, and the image of Christ in us will continue to increase in clarity. This is a progression in us from one level of understanding to another and from one degree of clarity to another, toward an ever-increasing perfection in the form of likeness to the image of the Son of God. . . .
And all of us, who with unveiled faces let the glory of the Lord be reflected in us, are thereby transformed into his image from glory to glory.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · Discipleship, 286
Therefore, if we are not open to that call within our heart, if our churches are not constantly looking for those transformations into greater faith and love, and yet our hearts long for it, then our children, like the Prodigal, will search for it elsewhere. But if we clone them well and hone them into our Christian collective, they too will forfeit the greater fullness and remain inside a castle so strong we’ll never be able to escape.
The continuity of the Christian tradition is not measured in exacting creedal confessions or doctrines of faith. We measure it by the growing clarity of our understanding of our faith, by our increasing power in faith and love, and by our ability to replicate the intimacy and power of Christ and his early disciples. No church today replicates that faith and love. So it begins with that acknowledgment, and from there we need to get to work.
Why has the Church resisted these Scriptural passages of change and transformation throughout the centuries? Again, it is because they are too dangerous, too difficult to institutionalize, too difficult to domesticate and control. So we satisfy ourselves with pseudo-unity and a faith that deteriorates with time if it ceases to grow. Leaders like stability; change — specifically ongoing transformation — carries the potential for something to go wrong, to get off course, to lead to institutional failings. Possibly our ways of relating and our institutionalization needed the time to grow, and premature freedom would have destroyed the Church altogether (Romans 14:20). But the Prodigal left the family in search of something more, and this cyclical phenomenon will not cease until the Church begins to open itself to and facilitate ongoing transformation.
It will begin to change when we begin to acknowledge some of these difficult passages. Their absence allows a soft perversion of faith to fill our churches. A living faith in one generation, unwilling to continue in its transformation, becomes a perverted faith in a later one — the lesson of Fiddler on the Roof. With courage, we need to grow up and allow our practice of love, our understanding of ourselves and God, and our understanding of how to do community to continue expanding.
A Perversion of Faith
Furthermore, combining the Scriptures and reinstituting their propositions, sacraments, and specific edifications will not reveal these new dimensions of maturity, though all these things are important. New dimensions of growth must emerge — not changes or adjustments in our behavior, but new qualitative ways in which we relate within our communities and the world. These new ways of relating should exhibit deeper levels of intimacy than have ever existed before in community.
We will identify and verify them because we will now be able to see them as recessively latent within past Christian tradition and the Scriptures, emerging into dominance in our interactions. They will know us by our love. Greater clarity should emerge in our stories within the Scriptures and the history of Christianity.
The eighteen-year-old may believe the same things at forty, but he believes them differently — more completely, and with less perforated innocence.
Once again, Christ is calling the church to grow up into even greater fullness of life. Our culture is pregnant with anticipation for a new way of relating more meaningfully with each other and, as is all too evident with the Prodigal, is fumbling to find it. Those outside the religious system flocked to Jesus, and yet many of those same kinds of people today refuse to enter the Church because of its failure to exhibit a greater fullness and a faith that attracts them. What they see is a moralizing community exhibiting a five-hundred-year-old faith, or older.
The story of van Gogh suggests that love is preeminent before all things, and that love first says to every person, “you belong,” before it ever asks, “what do you believe?” or “why do you do that?” As one author recently put it, modern Christianity tells the world it must believe, behave, and then belong, in that order. We think Jesus did just the opposite.
Until we are willing to recognize more appropriate ways of living and expressing our faith, we will continue to alienate ourselves from this generation — and from our own children.
