Are We Mistaken in Practice about the Real Purpose of the Church?

The early church were mostly outcasts, who understood the cost of discipleship and shunned fame, power and wealth as measures of their success. But we have embraced all of those things, and lost our witness and the core of our life in Christ as a result.

This leads to an important question about the purpose of the Church: Should it distress us that our local churches or denominations and their programs are not generating impressive statistics showing that our message and way of life are “popular?”  Is the Church, the Body of Christ, established to be “popular?”  If not, then did God ordain local churches to be “popular” bodies.  Stated another way, does God expect us to have impressive statistics as a measure of our “success?”  The answer to all of these questions appears to me to be “no.”  Remember what Jesus did the several times when great crowds started to follow him?  He said hard things that forced the crowd to recognize that following him would cost them their lives—though he would give them his own in exchange.  John 6:60-66; Luke 14:25-27; compare Matthew 19:16-30 (turning away the rich young ruler). He started talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  John 6:43-59. He told parables about counting the cost. Luke 14:28-35. He told them that anyone who was unwilling to pick up his cross and follow him was not worthy to be his disciple. Mark 8:34-38.

Or, what about the original band of Disciples in Jerusalem after the Resurrection? There are first stories of 3,000 and 5,000 being saved hearing Peter’s preaching. Acts 2:41; Acts 4:4. And then what?  Persecution—after the beginning of which no large numbers are mentioned. Acts 4:13-22.  It says the common people greatly respected the Apostles but would not join themselves to the church because of fear of persecution. Acts 5:11-13. And, about the same time the persecution started, God gave us the example of Ananias and Sapphira, who died for lying about their commitment, which also caused people to fear coming to Christ because of the consequences of doing so halfheartedly.  Acts 5:1-11. People continued coming in, but much more gradually.  There was a cost—just as Jesus said there would be.

Paul also was known to throw away the opportunity to have crowds follow him to keep his message pure—as in Lystra when the crowd wanted to worship him and Barnabas for healing a lame man (and, as a result of his rejection of their worship, the fickle crowd stoned him instead), or in Phillipi where Paul refused the “witness” of a demon-possessed girl to his message (instead, he cast the persistent demon out, and was jailed for it).  Acts 14:8-19, 16:16-24.  It can well be said that, wherever the Church recorded in the New Testament, or churches for 100 to 150 years after that, were found, they were outcasts.  They were not a “mass movement” built on the concepts of safety in numbers or safety in a crowd.  They understood the that their lives had been exchanged for Jesus’ life in them, and they also understood the cost that entailed. 

Somewhere in the intervening centuries, we have mostly lost that, looking individually for conformity, safety, and fire insurance as we go about our OWN  business instead of a new life, and looking corporately for large numbers (the sign of the “success” of a mass movement) and for worldly power and wealth instead of growth into the image of Christ.  I think the process by which this happened started rather early in church history, as I will explain in many later posts, but certainly affects us profoundly today.   From this perspective, asking why we can’t attract and retain large numbers of converts or of program participants is probably asking the wrong question in the first place.

Jacques Ellul stated the case on this point very forcefully:

If we grant that what the New Testament means by Christianity and being a Christian merely conforms to human ideas and pleases and flatters us as though it were all our own invention and teaching springing up from within ourselves, then there is no problem.  There is, however, a “but,” a difficulty, for what the New Testament means by being a Christian is the very opposite of what is natural to us.  It is thus a scandal.  We have either to revolt against it or at all costs to find cunning ways of avoiding the problem, such as by the trickery of calling Christianity what is in fact its exact antithesis, and giving thanks to God for the great favor of being Christians.  As Kierkegaard says, nothing displeases or revolts us more than New Testament Christianity when it is properly proclaimed. It can neither win millions of Christians nor bring revenues and earthly profits.  Confusion results.  If people are to agree, what is proclaimed must be to their taste and must seduce them… Never—no more today than in the year 30—can Christian revelation please us: in the depths of our hearts Christianity has always been a mortal enemy.  History bears witness that in generation after generation there has been a highly respected social class (that of priests) whose task is to make of Christianity the very opposite of what it really is.

Ellul, Jacques (G.W. Bromley, Tr.) , The Subversion of Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1986, 2011 reprint), 154.