The Church Introduction
John Wesley was right when he described Christianity as essentially a ‘social’ religion, and added that to turn it into a ‘solitary’ religion would be to destroy it. This is not to deny that it offers individual salvation and calls people to individual discipleship. It is rather to affirm that the church lies at the centre of God’s purpose. Christ gave himself for us, we are told, not only ‘to redeem us from all wickedness’, but also ‘to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good’.
The problem we have when we think about the church is the tension between the ideal and the reality. The ideal is beautiful. The church is the chosen and beloved people of God, his own special treasure, the covenant community to whom he has committed himself for ever. It is engaged in continuous worship of God and in compassionate outreach to the world, a haven of love and peace, and a pilgrim people headed for the eternal city. But in reality we who claim to be the church are often a motley rabble of rather scruffy individuals, half-educated and half-saved, uninspired in our worship, constantly bickering with each other. We are concerned more for our maintenance than our mission, struggling and stumbling along the road, needing constant rebuke and exhortation, which are readily available from both Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles.
This distinction between the ideal and the reality means that people’s opinions of the church vary enormously. On the one hand, P. T. Forsyth could write that ‘the church of Christ is the greatest and finest product of human history . . . the greatest thing in the universe’. On the other, Thomas Arnold wrote, ‘The church as it now stands no human power can save . . . When I think of the church, I could sit down and pine and die.’
My purpose in this book is to focus on the ideal, on what God intends his church to be, while all the time keeping in view the reality, so that we can grasp the changes which need to be made. The first two chapters are complementary, since we consider in chapter 1 the world’s challenge to the church and in chapter 2 the church’s mission in the world. In chapter 3 the renewal the church’s needs will be seen to include, as Jesus prayed, not only one area (e.g. its unity or its spirituality), but every area of its life. And to this end, those of us who have been ordained to the pastoral ministry of the church need ourselves to be renewed according to God’s purpose, which is the topic of chapter 4.