My Lovers' Quarrel

2024.  A new year.  We aim for change, but the reality is it’s hard to accomplish.

40 years ago, I started working in the institutional church.  I began as an eager and naive participant. Then experience and reflection caused me to question my assumptions.  I sought new insights and perspectives, which in turn led me to advocate for change.  It’s a relationship in which I have remained engaged for 40 years, working in various positions as an ‘intrapreneur’ attempting to inspire and lead change.  However, it’s not been an easy relationship. In fact I have had an ongoing “lover’s quarrel” with the institutional church.

I write this on January 1, 2024.  A day for contemplating change.  As I started with some reflection time, I read from a meditation I frequently use. The Lectio 365 reflection for this New Years Day ended up reigniting my lover’s quarrel.  Lectio's choice of words to characterize what mission advance means, elevated the ‘full time’ Christian worker, and by default undermined the majority of those who comprise the church.  It was inadvertent, I am sure.  But that’s a symptom of institutionalization, and the reason for my quarrel with it.  The institutional structure depends on the elevation and prioritization of certain roles & gifts because without them it could not sustain its purpose as an institution, nor it’s funding.  Its recruitment, training, and polity by default advance the class of people that are required to sustain the system.  This perpetuates a cycle of self preservation.  I have discovered as an internal change-agent that although this institutional system has the ability to change itself, its very existence is threatened by the change it seeks/needs.  A paralyzing irony.

Transitioning to the often-cited models espousing less structure and reduced dependence on a clergy class, so as to become a more scattered, organic and neighbourhood/marketplace model of existence, is often endorsed in the rhetoric and even strategic initiatives of church institutions.  However, this frequently falls flat during any attempt at execution.  Change is hard.  Execution is harder.  In the past 10 years I’ve led 3 change initiatives, all endorsed and funded by my denomination, that have either been closed or reduced to token, status-quo existence because of the relentless pressures of institutional thinking and demands.

I am not anti-institution, but I have a quarrel with it.  I stayed in it for 40 years advocating for and leading change until recently when I was released due to institutional budget pressures.  I still have hope that the church-as-institution might be courageous enough to change itself.  Where that isn’t feasible, at least be a sponsor/incubator of initiatives that eventually live and grow external to it.  In other words, be magnanimous and empower/cheer on what it can’t accomplish.  However, I no longer think that is possible for my denomination, nor for others. Whatever is now being birthed that is truly new and able to engage culture as effective Kingdom ambassadors, is for the most part coming from outside the institution of the church.  They are often small and scattered initiatives.  Most likely they will never gain the size, status or collective energy typical of the institution.  There is a part of me that wishes they could.  But then I suspect they would suffer the fate of the very institutions they were trying to influence and reform.

This is an historic tug of war.  A pattern that I believe is a divine check and balance to save the church from itself.  

The 5 core APEST gifts (see endnote) that are meant to simultaneously energize the church and keep it in dynamic tension, too often fall prey to their own competing values.  Rarely are they able to perform together in their natural state of tension.  Our humanity ensures that stalemate. Human nature leads us to prefer stability, captured in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  It’s how our brains work – which is why it is hard to change in the first place.  Logically then it’s how we work in collective community, such as in politics, clubs, associations and of course, the church.  Once we have established a measure of personal or collective stability, our preference is to remain there – whether it works for us or not! But change and growth comes from tension.  That tension in the institutional church’s context is the push-pull, the in-out breathing rhythm of the APEST gifts.  Their interplay is necessary to ensure a Christian community retains and displays the dynamic necessary to ensure true impact.  This isn’t happening.  Safety, security, and tolerance for incremental change dominates the institutional church psyche and strategy.

Here is where I part ways with many of my peers.  The church as we know it is not the hope of the world. Christ, the dynamic of that community, is the Hope of the world.  Let’s not confuse the institution of the church with the Community of Christ as some do.  They are not intrinsically identical.

I repeat - The church as institution is not the hope of the world.  Christ is.  Christ living and working through His people is the basis for how we are to organize and act.  The challenge has been, and is, that the institutional needs of the church really drive their agendas for change.  Choices around strategy, personnel or budgets are made in reference to its long-term survival or viability.  Let’s just be real here: rarely is a decision made that fundamentally re-shapes the posture and structure of the church, because its hard for insiders to be change-makers due to the existential threat to their own role, status and employment.  The usual outcome of a ‘what’s next’ vision discussion is a tweak that is trumpeted as innovation.  Tweaks can be communicated with bold rhetoric.  If a bold strategy is launched, I have seen how the cost is often experienced as too heavy to sustain.  The attempt withers.  The system is sustained.

My conclusion is that the church as institution won’t change to the extent needed for significant, relevant impact on this current world because it is incapable.  To reorganize away from institution to be a collective community of ambassadors of Christ, each empowered to build the Kingdom of God, is too threatening to existing livelihoods, missiology and ecclesiology.  As has been the case through history, change happens predominantly outside the institutional form. Some change agents may remain connected as though in orbit – still within the gravitational pull of the institution.  I’ve taken that route so far.  Others leave the pull of institutional gravity entirely.

I have my point of view.  You’ve read it here and in other of my blogs.  Yet the great hope I hold is that Christ works in and through all our imperfect organizational creations.  I truly wish the institutional system could change.  I dedicated the bulk of my career to that end.  I have seen some advances but also many disappointments.  My hope for its’ transmogrification is significantly diminished.  However, my hope lies in the universal Christ who is working through His community all around this world.  Those change agents/ambassadors are inside and outside the institution of the church.  Christ is ensuring that His ways are being advanced to bless and to change individuals and communities around the world.

So, let’s keep living and acting in hope.

Harv

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APEST = Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher.  Based on Ephesians 4 and popularized as a framework by Alan Hirsch in his book The Forgotten Ways.

Do We Get the Gathering?

 When you hear the word ‘church’, what’s the immediate picture that comes into view?

“Ecclesia” – a common Greek word referring to periodic political gatherings, was used to describe something about the new movement of Christians when they started to gather.  It has been translated as ‘church’, and has morphed from that sense of gathering periodically for a purpose, to describing the organizational expression of that gathering.  

When pastors call you back to ‘church’ in their post-pandemic effort to repopulate the pew, and when they say ‘you can’t love Jesus and not love the ‘church’, it may have a lot more to do about coming back to the ‘big house’, to the regular weekly ‘worship’ service, to the financial support and volunteer positions that need to be filled, than it does to the principle of being gathered around the purpose for which we exist. I am pushing buttons here, but please read on...

What is that purpose?  Jesus zeroed in on this when responding to a question about the most important commandment.  Read the exchange in Mark 12.  It was a question many people have: “What constitutes the core of faith, of devotion to God”?  The questioner wanted to know what they really needed to do if they were to be truly following God.  Jesus revealed the profound simplicity of what it means to live according to the Kingdom of God:  Love God fully, and equally so love your neighbour as you love yourself.  That’s it.  Jesus emphasized this is a more intimate proximity to the purposes of God for us than all our rituals, practices, programs and other accoutrements of our faith(s).

For the current expression of the ecclesia, the gathering called the church, the biggest question then becomes:  “What of your offerings & sacrifices, your services, programs, practices and organizational expressions, actually reveal and turn people toward loving God AND their neighbour?

I want to be careful not to project my own thoughts and experiences as universal, but I am having so many conversations with friends, colleagues, leaders, and believers outside my usual circles, who are deeply struggling with the current expression of church.  Call it what you want – a post pandemic malaise, apathy or laziness – but I think it’s critical to explore this at a deeper level.  Could this not be a movement among true followers who are asking themselves whether the very essence of their faith, loving God and loving their neighbour, is being facilitated, enhanced and enabled by their ‘ecclesia’?

We believe the Holy Spirit of God perpetually illuminates the truth of God to the world.  How we gather right now has not always had this form.  What we believe about God, Christ and the Kingdom has not always been understood as we know it now.  There is a constant metamorphosis to our personal and collective encounters with God.

What is the Spirit illuminating right now to you personally, and to you as a leader of a ‘church’?  

A god we can use.

Poor god.

These days everyone is making a claim on 'god'.  He/She is popular because people find that eliciting the support of a deity gives legitimacy and even power to their particular point of view.  Religious groups, terrorists, healers, political parties and just about anyone seeking a way to justify their position, often brings 'god' into the equation.

What or who is this 'god', this popular Purveyor of Power, this Authority on Anything, this Collaborator on Convictions?  Whomever He/She is, I wonder what they think about the attention they are getting in this world?

A god without a name, without a self-defined identity is a very convenient god.  That is a god we can use according to our own personal needs. You can mold that god into anything you want as you sort out your existence & 'place' with neighbours, politics, morality, lifestyles, economics, community and yes, even vaccinations.  A god like that is just so useful!

But what if this god has a name?  What if they are self-defined?  A name means something.  Your own name identifies you.  It's not merely a label as though it was an impersonal number.  Your name comes to represent YOU - your character, convictions, loves, dreams and a host of other qualities.

God has a Name.  But what a name!  God Self-revealed as Yawheh/Jehovah, which was a name deemed too sacred to even be spoken, so other names (dozens and dozens) were used to help paint the picture.    This is important, because a name means something.  If the name of God is too sacred to be spoken and takes multiple other descriptors to define, that in itself should keep us from turning God into whatever thing we want to use God for. He is not for us to define.

Yet even we who follow Gods incarnate Christ often make God into a thing we use.  Allow me to unpack an example by turning my attention to myself and my peers who lead other followers of this God.

It is baffling to understand how the institutional church, the gathering that is meant to reflect God to the world, can ignore or minimize the Creators' omnipresence in the nooks and crannies of life on this planet, and virtually ignore how the ways and presence of Yahweh has everything to do with community life, creation care, social and political well-being, economic structures, treatment of the marginalized - I could go on.  The institutionalized church does this by concentrating almost exclusively on how to ensure the activity of the congregation preserves and adds to the longevity of the organization.  The intention and rhetoric may be 'missional', but the reality is that too often God is used to justify the efforts to perpetuate the organization.

YAHWEH, JEHOVAH, CREATOR, acted and spoke though a people in history as told in Scripture, although He Himself is beyond Scripture.  Yet we have used those same inspired words and stories as talismans and tools so we can use God for our purposes.  It was/is Christian leaders who have found theological justification to align with political despots, to support and service anti-human programs of government (residential schools), and to hide sinful and illegal behaviour within their congregations from the law  - all to preserve the institution. Less onerous but just as relevant is how we connect alignment to the denomination or local church with a persons identity in Christ.  It's wrong, but it is a convenient way to use God for our purposes. 

And we have become addicted to it.  

As Elijah encountered in his various confrontations with Baal worshipers (former Yawheh worshippers by the way) that culminated in that grand spectacle on Mt. Carmel, there's an addictive quality to worshiping a convenient god you can use, conjured up as needed to fulfill a need or want.  That was Israels' relationship with Baal.  How about us - do we have a convenient Baal-like image of God?

To give up our image of God is to give up our control of, and influence over, God.  We no longer can have our way with Him in order to keep the church in order.  Even in the face of the true God's power, Ahab & Jezebel (and many others) maintained their addiction.  Do we?  Eugene Petersen reminds us all that even in the face of God's Truth, it's very hard to "let go of the comforting illusions that allow us to live with guilt-free dishonesty". (The Jesus Way, p 125.)  That guilt free dishonesty by the way plagues our relationship with indigenous peoples in Canada, even in the face of Gods' truth that all humans are equally made in God's image.

This is a call to you to seek and submit to the God with a Name, who is not, and will not be defined by your constitution, tradition, dogma or your forms for worshiping Him. This is a call for you to pay attention to the living and active voice of God Himself, to examine the ties that bind your obedience to convenience, pragmatism, dogma, denomination or religion. Stay alert and knowledgeable that the rituals of your so-called faith may be more a religion of useful convenience than they are expressions of submission and obedience to a living and active God.

Who is this God?  

Who are we before Him?

Harv Matchullis