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.
