Dimensions of church renewal
Over the last hundred years or so the church has seen a series of renewal movements, each focusing on a particular aspect of ecclesiastical life. I can think of at least six.
First, at the beginning of the twentieth century the missionary movement received fresh impetus at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. The church growth movement founded by Dr Donald McGavran, and the Lausanne Movement with its congresses on world evangelization (Lausanne 1974, Manila 1989 and South Africa 2010), have given this considerable further stimulus.
Second, there was the biblical theology movement whose foundation was laid by the emphasis of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner on the ‘otherness’ of God and his Word. It flourished between 1945 and 1960 under biblical scholars like Gerhard von Rad (Old Testament) and Oscar Cullmann (New Testament), who stressed the inner unity of Scripture.
Next, the ecumenical movement took shape in the formation of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, and stressed the need to unite the churches in their witness to the world.
Fourth, the post-war liturgical movement, especially (though not exclusively) in the Roman Catholic Church, aimed to modernize the worship of the congregation. The Second Vatican Council gave this a further boost.
Fifth, the charismatic movement sought to incorporate the distinctive emphases of Pentecostal churches into mainline denominations, and was concerned for the restoration of spiritual power and spiritual gifts to the body of Christ.
Sixth, the social justice movement, ranging from the cluster of liberation theologies to the recovery of the evangelical social conscience, sought to balance the church’s eternal and other-worldly preoccupations with its temporal, this-worldly responsibilities.
Thus mission, theology, unity, worship, power and justice are six legitimate Christian concerns, each of which has gathered round it devoted protagonists. Yet the result has been an unhealthily fragmented agenda. What we need is a holistic or integrated vision of renewal in every dimension of the church’s life.
The Roman Catholic word for this, at least since the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965), has been aggiornamento, the process of bringing the church up to date to meet the challenges of the modern world. The world is changing rapidly, and if the church is to survive, it must keep pace with this change, albeit without compromising its own standards or conforming to the world’s.
Protestants use a different vocabulary to describe the continuous need to restore and refresh the church. Our two favourite words are ‘reform’, indicating the kind of reformation of faith and life according to Scripture which took place in the sixteenth century, and ‘revival’, denoting a supernatural visitation of a church or community by God, bringing conviction, repentance, confession, the conversion of sinners and the recovery of backsliders. ‘Reformation’ usually stresses the power of the Word of God, and ‘revival’ the power of the Spirit of God. Perhaps we should use the word ‘renewal’ to describe a movement which combines revival by God’s Spirit with reformation by his Word. Since the Word is the Spirit’s sword, there is bound to be something lopsided about contemplating one without the other.
For an integrated vision of continuous renewal, we cannot do better than reflect on Jesus’ prayer for his people in John 17. Without doubt, this is one of the most profound chapters of the Bible. There are depths here which we will never fathom; all we can do is paddle in the shallows. Here are heights we cannot scale; we can only climb the foothills.
Nevertheless, we must persevere. For if the upper-room discourse (John 13 – 17) is the temple of Scripture, John 17 is its inner sanctuary or holy of holies. Here we are introduced to the presence, mind and heart of God. We are permitted to eavesdrop as the Son communes with the Father. We need to take off our shoes, since this is holy ground.
Jesus prays
We will concentrate on the second and third sections (verses 6–26).
As a matter of fact, Jesus does not begin his prayer for his people until the end of verse 11. Before this, in verses 6–11a he describes the people he is going to pray for. It is quite an elaborate description and, although it refers primarily to the apostles, it concerns them as ordinary disciples rather than in their distinctive apostolic ministry. The description has three parts.
First, they belong to Christ. Three times Jesus repeats the truth that the Father has ‘given’ them to him out of the world (verses 6 and 9), so that they belong to him.
Second, they know the Father. For if the Father has given them to the Son, the Son has given them a revelation of the Father. This too is repeated: ‘I have revealed you [literally ‘your name’] to those whom you gave me out of the world’ (verse 6). Also, ‘I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them’ (verse 8). Of course this revelation of God’s name, this gift of God’s words, was made in the first instance to the apostles, but from them it has been passed on to all Christ’s disciples.
Third, they live in the world. ‘I will remain in the world no longer,’ Jesus says, ‘but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you’ (verse 11a). Although they have been given to Christ ‘out of the world’ (verse 6), they nevertheless remain ‘in the world’ (verse 11a) out of which they have been taken. They are to be spiritually distinct, but not socially segregated. Jesus leaves them behind as his representatives or ambassadors.
Here, then, is Jesus’ threefold characterization of his people, beginning with his apostles, but including all later disciples, reaching even to us. First, the Father has given us to the Son. Second, the Son has revealed to us the Father. Third, we live in the world. It is this threefold orientation (to the Father, to the Son and to the world) which makes us the ‘holy’ people we are. We live in the world as a people who know God and belong to Christ, and therefore (it is implied) have a unique mission to make him known.
What then does Christ pray for his people whom he has so carefully described? The burden of his intercession consists of only two words, which are repeated. ‘Holy Father, protect them . . . My prayer is . . . that you protect them from the evil one’ (verses 11b and 15). It is a prayer that the holy Father will keep us the holy people we are, that he will protect and preserve us from any and every evil influence which might spoil the unique position he has given us. It is a prayer that we may be kept true to who we are, to our essential Christian identity, as a people who know God, belong to Christ and live in the world.
More particularly, Jesus prays that his people may have four characteristics, namely truth, holiness, mission and unity.
Truth (verses 11–13)
A literal translation of verse 11b could be ‘Keep them in your name’, but commentators are not agreed how to translate the preposition ‘in’. The niv renders it ‘Protect them by the power of your name.’ Yet the context seems to require that God’s name is not so much the power by which, as the sphere in which, the disciples are to be kept. I think, then, that the Jerusalem Bible is correct to translate it: ‘Keep those you have given me true to your name.’ The revelation of God’s name was ‘the enclosing wall, as it were, within which they were to be kept’. For God’s name is God himself – who he is, his being and his character. This the Father has revealed to the Son, and the Son in his turn has revealed to the apostles (verse 6). During his earthly ministry, Jesus has kept them in it (verse 12). Now, however, he is about to leave the world. So he prays that the Father will keep them loyal to the name he has revealed to them, ‘so that they may be one as we are one’ (verse 11). The main means by which they will be united will be their loyalty to God’s truth revealed in and through Christ.
Truth, then, was the first concern for his church which Jesus expressed in his prayer. He spoke of revelation, of the disclosure by him of God’s otherwise hidden name. He made plain his longing that his people would be loyal to this revelation, and that their unity would be based on their common faithfulness to it. Instead, today I fear that some contemporary church leaders are guilty of serious unfaithfulness. A few are brash enough to deny the fundamentals both of the historic Christian faith and of traditional Christian morality, while others seem as unsure of themselves and their beliefs as a blushing adolescent teenager.
There is no possibility of the church being thoroughly renewed until and unless it is renewed in its commitment to God’s revealed truth in Jesus Christ, and in the full biblical testimony to him. Nor is there any chance of the church recovering its unity until it recovers the only authentic basis for unity, which is truth. Jesus prayed first for the truth of the church; we should do the same. For God intends his church to be ‘the pillar and foundation of the truth’.
Holiness (verses 14–16)
Jesus prayed that the Father would keep his people not only true to his name, but also ‘from the evil one’ (verse 15). That is, he desired that they would be preserved on the one hand from error and in truth, and on the other hand from evil and in holiness. The church’s final destiny, Paul was later to declare, is to be presented to Christ ‘as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless’. But the church’s holiness must begin now.
So what is meant by ‘holiness’? All down through history the church has tended to go to extremes, as we considered in the last chapter. Sometimes, in its right determination to be holy, it has withdrawn from the world and lost contact with it. At other times, in its equally right determination not to lose contact, it has conformed to the world and become virtually indistinguishable from it. But Christ’s vision for the church’s holiness is neither withdrawal nor conformity.
Withdrawal was the way of the Pharisees. Anxious to apply the law to the details of everyday life, they had a false understanding of holiness, imagining that mere contact with evil and evil people would bring contamination. And a form of Christian pharisaism or separatism has lingered in the church. It has often been due to a passionate longing for holiness and a zeal to preserve Christian culture from destruction by the wicked world. These motives persuaded the hermits to flee into the desert in the fourth century, and led to the development of medieval monasticism. But, noble as the motives of monks and hermits often were, the kind of monasticism which entailed withdrawal from the world was a betrayal of Christ. So too is the kind of modern piety which imprisons Christians in a ghetto-like fellowship, cutting them off from non-Christians. For Jesus specifically prayed that, although he wanted his disciples to be protected from the evil one, he did not want them to be taken out of the world (verse 15).
If ‘withdrawal’ was the way of the Pharisees, ‘conformity’ was the way of the Sadducees. Belonging to wealthy, aristocratic families, they collaborated with the Romans and sought to maintain the political status quo. This compromising tradition also persisted in the early church, and still survives today.
The motive for it can again be good, namely the resolution to break down barriers between the church and the world, and to be the friends of tax collectors and sinners, as Jesus was. But he was also ‘set apart from sinners’ in his values and standards.
In place of these two extreme positions, Jesus calls us to live ‘in the world’ (verse 11) while remaining ‘not of the world’ (verse 14), that is, neither belonging to it, nor imitating its ways. This is the ‘holy worldliness’ of the church which we explored in the previous chapter. We are neither to give in nor to opt out. Instead, we are to stay in and stand firm, like a rock in a mountain stream, like a rose blooming in mid-winter, like a lily growing in a manure heap.
Mission (verses 17–19)
There are fifteen references to ‘the world’ in Jesus’ prayer, which indicates that one of his main concerns was how his people would relate to the world, that is, to non-Christian society or godless secularism. He indicated that his people had been given to him out of the world (verse 6), but were not to be taken out of it (verse 15); that they were still living in the world (verse 11), but were not to be of the world (verse 14b); that they would be hated by the world (verse 14a), but were nevertheless sent into the world (verse 18). This is the multi-faceted relationship of the church to the world: living in it, not belonging to it, hated by it and sent into it.
Perhaps the best way to grasp this is that, in place of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘conformity’, which are wrong attitudes to the world, we see the right one as ‘mission’. Indeed, the church’s mission in the world is possible only if it avoids these two false tracks. If we withdraw from the world, mission is obviously impossible, since we have lost contact. Equally, if we conform to the world, mission is impossible, since we have lost our cutting edge.
It is particularly striking that, although we live ‘in’ the world (verse 11), we nevertheless need to be sent ‘into’ it (verse 18). But that is the case. It is all too possible for Christian people to live in the world without having any share in Christ’s mission.
Christ’s prayer for his people here is that the Father will ‘sanctify’ us by his word of truth (verse 17), indeed that we may be ‘truly sanctified’ like Christ, who sanctified himself for us (verse 19). What kind of sanctification is in mind, we must ask, if it is one in which Christ himself participated? How can the sinless Christ be said to have sanctified himself? The answer is surely that sanctification has two complementary aspects, negative and positive. To be sanctified is to be separated from evil in all its forms. This is what we usually think about when the word ‘sanctification’ is used. But to be sanctified is also to be set apart for the particular ministry to which God has called us. It is in this sense that Jesus set himself apart for us, namely to come into the world to seek and to save us. We too have been ‘sanctified’, or set apart for our mission in the world. In fact, we can be described as ‘separated from the world to be of service to the world’.
In verse 18 (as in John 20:21), Jesus draws a deliberate parallel between his mission and ours: ‘As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.’ In what sense, then, did Jesus intend his mission to be the model of ours? There are substantial differences, of course. His being sent into the world entailed both the incarnation and the atonement, whereas we are not God that we could ‘become flesh’ or die for sinners. Nevertheless, the fact that we are sent into the world like him will shape our understanding of mission. It tells us that mission involves
Unity (verses 20–26)
Jesus’ prophetic eyes now peered into the future beyond the apostolic era. He saw the coming generations of his disciples who would not have seen or heard him in the flesh, as the apostles had done, but who would believe in him through their teaching. ‘My prayer is not for them [the apostles] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message’ (verse 20). This means every Christian of every age and place, including us. True, we may have come to believe in Jesus through the witness of our parents, or of a pastor, evangelist, teacher or friend. Yet their witness was a secondary witness, an endorsement from their own experience of the primary witness of the apostles. The apostles were the eyewitnesses, specially chosen by Jesus to be with him, so that they could bear witness to what they had seen and heard. There is only one authentic Christ, the Christ of the apostolic witness, now preserved in the New Testament. All believers since the apostolic age have believed in Jesus ‘through their message’.
What, then, does Jesus desire for all his believing people throughout the world and the centuries? There can be no doubt about this because he expresses it three times:
verse 2la: ‘that all of them may be one’
verse 22b: ‘that they may be one’
verse 23b: ‘that they may become perfectly one’ (rsv)
These are well-known petitions. What is not so well known or understood is the nature of the unity for which Christ prayed. He stressed two aspects of it.
First, he prayed that his people would enjoy unity with the apostles. Consider carefully what is recorded in verses 20–21a: ‘My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one.’ We have already seen that Jesus distinguishes between two groups of people: ‘these’ (the little band of apostles gathered round him) and ‘those’ (the huge company of all subsequent believers) (rsv and neb). They are the teachers and the taught. He then prays that ‘all of them’, which must mean ‘these’ and ‘those’ together, ‘may be one’. In other words, Jesus’ prayer was first and foremost that there might be a historical continuity between the apostles and the post-apostolic church. He prays that the church’s faith might not change with the changing years, but remain recognizably the same. He prays that the church of every generation might merit the label ‘apostolic’ because of its loyalty to the message and mission of the apostles. Christian unity begins, then, as unity with the apostles through the New Testament, which makes their teaching available to us. Without this, church unity would not be distinctively Christian.
Second, Jesus prayed that his people would enjoy unity with the Father and the Son. Although the punctuation of verse 21 is disputed, most English versions regard its second clause as beginning a new sentence. We might render it as follows: ‘Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, [I pray that they] may also be in us, that the world may believe.’ The implications of this petition are staggering. For Jesus prays that the union of his people with God may be comparable to the unity of the Father and the Son in the Godhead. He goes on in verse 23, ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one’ (esv).
So, then, the Christian unity for which Christ prayed was not primarily unity with each other, but unity with the apostles (a common truth), and unity with the Father and the Son (a common life). The visible, structural unity of the church is a proper goal. Yet it will be pleasing to God only if it is the visible expression of something deeper, namely unity in truth and in life. In our ecumenical concern, therefore, nothing is more important than the quest for more apostolic truth and more divine life through the Holy Spirit. As William Temple put it, ‘the way to the union of Christendom does not lie through committee-rooms, though there is a task of formulation to be done there. It lies through personal union with the Lord so deep and real as to be comparable with his union with the Father.’
It is this kind of unity (a shared truth and life) which will bring the world to believe in Jesus (verses 21 and 23). Indeed, the main reason why Jesus prays for the unity of his people is ‘in order that’ the world may believe in Jesus’ divine origin and mission. He prays that all who will in future ‘believe’ in him (verse 20) may enjoy such unity of truth and life that the world may ‘believe’ in him too. Thus faith gives birth to faith, and believers multiply.
In the final verses of his prayer (24–26), Jesus looks beyond history to eternity, for it is only in heaven that the unity of his people will be brought to perfection. They will see his glory (verse 24), and the end result of the Son’s revelation of the Father will be that they experience for themselves both the same love which the Father has for the Son and the indwelling of the Son himself (verse 26). This ultimate unity, comprehending the Father, the Son and the church in love, is certainly beyond our imagination, but it is not beyond our humble and ardent desire.
Jesus’ prayer, then, is much more comprehensive than is commonly realized. It is a prayer for the church’s truth (‘keep them in your name’), holiness (‘keep them from the evil one’), mission (‘sanctify them . . . I have sent them into the world’) and unity (‘that they may be one’).
One of the tragedies of the contemporary church is its tendency to atomize this holistic vision of Christ, and to select one or other of his concerns to the exclusion of the rest. But, as Archbishop Michael Ramsey said, ‘A movement which concentrates on unity as an isolated concept can mislead the world and mislead us, as indeed would a movement which had the exclusive label of holiness or the exclusive label of truth.’
The major preoccupation of the church in the twentieth century was the search for structural unity, but often without a comparable quest for the truth and the life that constitute authentic unity, and are the means by which it grows.
Others have been preoccupied with truth (doctrinal orthodoxy), sometimes becoming dry, harsh and unloving in the process, forgetting that truth is to be adorned with the beauty of holiness.
Holiness seems of paramount importance to others, that is, the state of the church’s interior life. But such people sometimes withdraw into a self-centred piety, forgetting that we have been called out of the world in order to be sent back into it, which is ‘mission’.
So mission becomes the obsession of a fourth group. But they sometimes forget that the world will come to believe in Jesus only when his people are one in truth, holiness and love.
Truth, holiness, mission and unity belonged together in the prayer of Jesus, and they need to be kept together in our quest for the church’s renewal today. I think we can detect them in the earliest Spirit-filled church in Jerusalem, since we are told in Acts 2:42 and 47 that ‘the [people] devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching’ (truth), ‘to the fellowship’ (unity) and ‘to the breaking of bread and to prayer’ (worship expressing their holiness), while ‘the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved’ (mission). It seems to me legitimate also to see the same characteristics in the four traditional ‘notes’ or ‘marks’ of the church, according to the Nicene Creed, namely that it is ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’. For ‘catholic’ includes the concept of embracing all truth, and ‘apostolic’ includes the vision of being committed to the apostolic mission.
It is important that we do not separate what God has joined. Instead, we must seek the renewal of the church in all four dimensions simultaneously, so that it faithfully guards the revelation which has once for all been entrusted to it, becomes sanctified and unified by this truth which it preserves, and goes out boldly into the world on its God-given mission of witness and service.