The other day, I noted that Jared Wilson has begun posting his own 95 theses on the state of the American church; having covered discipleship and community in his first two postings, today he posted 19 more theses on the church—what the American church is vs. what the church ought to be. Unsurprisingly, in his distillation of the ongoing themes of his blog, he’s making a lot of important and provocative points, points which I think the church badly needs to hear and consider. I’m not going to try to offer any profound overarching comment on them, at least at this time; but there are a couple side comments which occurred to me.First, an observation on Jared’s Thesis 46: The American Church loves the spirit of the age and idolizes relevancy. This is I think a particularly important point. I’ve written about the idolatry of relevance before, at some length, with respect to worship; I think this is a classic case of unexamined assumptions corrupting and killing the best of intentions. Certainly, the church should never be irrelevant—but making relevance the goal smuggled in some ideas which completely undermined the proclamation of the gospel, and turned our worship to idolatry.Second, and much more minor, off his Theses 40-41: Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. Much of what passes for church in America will be prevailed against by hell. One of the things which interests me about the way the church deals with that statement by Jesus is that it’s so often read defensively, as if Jesus is saying, “Hell’s going to attack the church, but stand strong, it won’t defeat you.” This, it seems to me, betrays a very limited and modest understanding of the role and responsibility and power of the church, and a very limited vision of who we’re called to be and what we’re called to do; that in turn, I believe, makes us think that it’s well enough to content ourselves with self-help feel-good stuff. The question people never seem to ask is, when was the last time you saw gates chasing someone down the street? Last time I checked, gates don’t move. Jesus’ image there in Matthew is offensive, it’s about taking the battle to the enemy. To be sure, that too can be overdone and misused, but it’s still an important truth: we are not here merely to endure until we get to go to heaven, and thus it isn’t anywhere near enough to give the church teaching and programs which will make our endurance more enjoyable, comfortable and fulfilling. Rather, we have been given a mission to go into the strongholds of the enemy and rescue his prisoners, in the confidence that the gates of Hell will not prevail against us—which is not a promise that every battle will always go just as we wish, but is the assurance that we will win the war, because Jesus has already won it. But of course, if we’re going to take that mission seriously, then we need preaching, teaching, and worship to match.

There’s an excellent piece up on the Alban Institute website, written by a Lutheran pastor named John Berntsen, called “The Impossible Task of Ministry,” which I commend to your reading—and not only if you’re a pastor; like Dr. Andrew Purves’ book The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, which I wrote about here and here, I think the Rev. Berntsen’s piece is important reading for anyone who’s in leadership in the church in any way at all. Indeed, one way in which his article could serve the church is as a more accessible introduction to the theme Dr. Purves takes up in his short but dense book; since the article is adapted from a book of his own titled Cross-Shaped Leadership: On the Rough and Tumble of Parish Practice, I’ll be interested to read the book and see how he develops it, and how his insights complement and perhaps differ from Dr. Purves’ work. For now, here’s an excerpt to encourage you to read the article:

At a deeper level, the cross is the story of the world’s resistance to grace. The cross is the showdown—yes, the confrontation—between a steadfastly loving God who wills and calls a world into covenant partnership and a world that wants to live in its own strength, playing God for itself. Jesus comes preaching a kingdom of righteousness, justice, and unconditional love, and the world says, “No thanks. We think our system of merit and scorekeeping and judgment is safer. We prefer the reign of our marketplace to your upside-down kingdom that reckons by grace. So count us out.”But public leadership in the church is subject to a continuous cycle of death and resurrection. The very initiatives, actions, and plans of leaders undergo the cross. Under the cross, the moment-by-moment doings of ministry are subject to countless deaths and resurrections, few of which are heroic or glorious. So how does this transformation take place amid the rough and tumble of parish practice—through what I call cross-shaped leadership? . . .Ministry is hard. Ministry is, in fact, impossible. (Just try to referee a fair fight about the virtues of “contemporary” versus “traditional” worship if you need any reminders about that.) It’s a perfect storm in which leaders are pressured either to pick winners and losers or to feed the multitudes by offering a cafeteria of consumer choices. Here’s the good news, though. Once we’ve accepted the truth that ministry is hard, even impossible—once we’ve stopped living in denial of this reality, or perhaps whining about it—it becomes the truth that sets us free. We cease being gloomy servants, weighed down by our resentful conviction that we are all alone in our work, and instead become joyful coworkers of a strong, wise, and consoling Lord.

Jared has a great post up at GDC on spiritual maturity and the ways we in the church try to measure it; I commend it to your reading, because I think he raises some important questions and concerns.

But generally speaking—and here I’m not at all picking on the REVEAL survey but on the evangelical Church’s approach to gauging spiritual maturity in general—our measuring stick amounts to Participation and Feelings.And here’s where I get hung up: I’m not sure spiritual maturity can be quantified that way. . . .The way this gets boiled down so often amounts to “How much church stuff do you do?” and “How do you feel about yourself?”And frankly, some of the most spiritually mature people I know are very insecure about their sin and their own brokenness and are struggling to find their place in the modern church.

One wonders what we would make, given this approach, of someone who led a major ministry and spoke all over the place, yet confessed privately that they had no sense at all of the presence of God in their life. Would we conclude that Mother Theresa was spiritually immature?The truth is, I think Jared’s right: I don’t think we can measure spiritual maturity. I don’t even think, as he suggests, that we can count on time to bring spiritual maturity—in my experience of the church, I’ve been sadly disappointed on that score more than once. You can’t put a yardstick on love, or weigh out joy on a scale, or measure the volume of someone’s peace with a tablespoon. Ultimately, I think when it comes to spiritual maturity, we have to borrow a line from Justice Potter Stewart (used of a very different subject, of course) and just recognize that we can’t define it, but we know it when we see it.This is, I think, even true on the church level. I do believe that a more spiritually mature church will tend to pray more, be more involved in missions, and so on, but correlation is not causation; there are churches that do a great deal but are very shallow in their corporate theology and relationship with God. Contrariwise, Aberdeen, Scotland’s Gilcomston South under the Rev. Willie Still had very few programs but grew deep, strong, mature Christians. (I trust that it still does, but I have no direct knowledge of it since his death.) I understand the desire—I want to know if the church I lead is growing spiritually, if the work I’m doing is bearing any real fruit—and I think these questions are worth asking, because they do give us real information; we just need to be careful to recognize what they aren’t telling us.