Beyond Deconstruction: Fifth Term(s)
Those who deconstructing their previous Christian faith and moving toward reconstruction, or even thinking theoretically of what a reconstructed Christian faith would look like, can be sickened and cynical about Sunday services.
They can attend, sing along, look around, and may be asking questions like these:
Is this what Jesus wanted?
Is this what church is all about?
Is this what Jesus wanted us to do with our money?
Is this what Jesus wanted us to spend our week aimed at?
Is this worship?’
Is one person speaking and thousands sitting there – some evidently in a daze or doze – what Jesus did?
Is this – this huge gathering of people I don’t even know, whose names I’ve never heard, whom I will not see again perhaps ever or only in passing a month or two from now – what Jesus came to establish?
Is this entertainment-industry performance by the worship team what Jesus or his followers had in mind?
Reconstructors are asking these questions and many others about church services and about the Sunday-focus of church. They know this church-life and they wonder if that is what it is about.
They are asking about what the NT called “fellowship” of the “siblings” or brothers and sisters in Christ. They are asking if what we do is actually what Jesus even would tolerate.
Because these reconstructors no longer trust the shape of the church today they are asking ground-level questions. They want to know what it really means to be the church in the way Jesus wanted.
Lesslie Newbigin once said to a monthly gathering of pastors that
We surely ought to be much more seriously concerned than we usually are by the colossal difference between the pattern that Jesus set, and the way our church life is normally conducted.
I suggest the fifth term, which is actually two terms, is friendship precedes fellowship. Yes, they want fellowship but they have big doubts sitting in a nice chair on Sunday in silence (or some singing or saying words from the liturgy) can legitimately be called fellowship. And if it doesn’t start with friendship it can never be fellowship.
Scot McKnight is the author of Pastor Paul, which has two chapters on friendship and siblingship. Siblingship, or fellowship, transcends friendship but siblingship begins with friendship.
In many cases they don’t trust the people around them and they have questions now about the people on the platform. They may not even distrust them but they don’t know those on the platform and the platformed don’t know them. It’s at best a distant admiration and more commonly a distant unknowing.
Distant unknowing or distant admiration is not fellowship.
So they want to begin with their friends with whom they have learned what actual fellowship is. They know what they experience with their friends is not the fellowship of sitting in a church in distant unknowing. They also know that genuine fellowship has to include friendship. There is not fellowship without friendship.
Read Romans 16 sometime. Paul knows the names of those in house churches in Rome. Read one of the Gospels and notice the up-close-and-personal ways of Jesus and his followers, of their conversations on the paths and their fellowship at a table in a home, and the stories Jesus told them. Notice how praxis-oriented Paul’s teachings are. His ethics are not theories but on-the-ground relational formation. If Love is the first term for Jesus and Paul and John for the Christian ethic, then their way of life is a life of intimate knowing not distant unknowing.
One time I was playing golf with a megachurch teaching pastor. He said to me candidly, and I was rather surprised because he was after all a teaching pastor at a megachurch, “I could ditch the Sunday services. All that really matters to me is our small group. That’s what church is and that’s what church means to me. If we got rid of Sunday services I’d be totally fine.”
Reconstructors, or at least many I have talked with, think the same way.
Fellowship, which is a relationship of love and justice and peace and grace with fellow followers of Jesus, begins with friendship, not with distant unknowing. The intimate knowing of friendships-become-fellowship strikes me as what the reconstructors want as the future of the church.
I quoted Newbigin earlier. Here he is again about the new wine (reconstruction) in old wineskins (deconstruction):
There is a right kind of conservatism in the Church, but it consists in this: to keep absolutely firm in allegiance to Jesus who is himself the great revolutionary; to keep absolutely central in our thinking the Cross which is the final ‘No’ to every human order that claims to be perfect and self-sufficient; and by so keeping close to the Cross, to receiving constantly afresh the power of his risen life which is always power for radical renewal.
I find it interesting that the topics on church life and how it should be constituted have so many parallels with the early days of the Shepherding Movement. There is much many could say about what went wrong, but what went right, was a rediscovery of the Kingdom of God, discipleship, small groups versus large gatherings, life together that went beyond a Sunday event, the need for pastors to have pastors, gifts that were meant to strengthen the body. Many churches eschewed Sunday morning meetings for small group or house meetings. Buildings for a time were an anathema. If you read the New Wine Magazines character was a central point of many of the teachings. There is much you can say that went sideways but to hear your questions in this most recent post, those questions and more were issues that leaders were grappling with in the 70’s and 80’s.
I think the Newbiggin quotes are spot on; I would hope people would read the words "revolutionary" and "radical renewal" with the depth from which I believe he wrote them. There are still many kind, sincere, Jesus-centered people in Evangelicalism, who are doing the best they can to follow him. Many of them are frustrated and hurting, as you've highlighted with this series, Scot.
Just a reminder to folks that the kinds of questions at the top of the OP were being asked even before Christianity became legal, and were the impetus for the monastic movement that started as early as the mid-200s AD. So all of this is nothing new. It does seem to have a new sort of "flavor", though.
The point about fellowship is absolutely right. Most people don't understand that the sibling relationship in the ancient world was more intense than simply the people with whom you grew up. In addition, my very favorite blogger, Fr Stephen Freeman (who studied Classics) says that "fellowship" is too weak a translation for <i>koinonia</i> - it should rather be "communion". This is a much deeper level than even solid friendship; it has connotations that are supposed to make you think of the connections within the body (as in Body of Christ). I think the lack of this kind of relationship among Christians reflects the wider loneliness endemic in our society now. Of course friendship is needed. We're so thirsty for it that we don't remember that we don't actually have to be "friends" with everyone in our parish/congregation, because being part of the communion, of the Body of Christ, as siblings in Christ, ties us even more closely. But yes, we do need friends, and the best of friendships should be people who share our "blood tie", if you will, with Christ - those with whom we worship.
Which leads to the last thing, but perhaps what stands out most to me about the OP. I don't agree that getting rid of Sunday services is the answer. There are important theological reasons that Christians meet on Sundays. However, a de-ritualized, de-sacramentalized gathering that is devoid of the Mystical and has no historical connection to faithful Christians through the ages is pretty thin gruel. For various reasons, most Evangelicals won't allow themselves to think outside the box of "if we just have the right teaching everything will fall into place", and tend to want to throw the Sunday-meeting baby out with the over-intellectualized bathwater. EOrthodoxy and other "high" churches with worship that involves the body and habitual practices that are meant to open people to the work of the Holy Spirit are also experiencing a net loss of members. Catechsis is necessary; there does have to be some explanation of what it all means, but even with that people leave.
But with the highest worship and the deepest, most meaningful and connected theology in Christianity, at least in the East (even with our problems, too) there's "something there" there.
Dana