Many years ago, a small group of believers challenged the reactionary autocracy that the mainline Church had become. The church had imposed a creedal legalism on the people that effectively separated the ordinary man and woman from the simple but life-changing message of New Testament faith in Christ.
This new radical movement wanted to by-pass the religious and clerical constructs of the day and call believers to a simple Spirit-directed, bible based faith. They studied the Scriptures together; they relished their common unity around the bread and the wine, and they proclaimed Christ - not the rituals and intrigues of established religion. The ‘brothers’, as they were known, coined the phrase: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things love.”
The fearless preaching of their leader disturbed the Church and the religious culture of his day so much that he was put to death by the religious establishment of his day!
I speak of course, of Jan Hus and the Moravian movement of the 1400s. Though their legacy was to pave the way for the first large-scale protestant mission movement and for the Reformation a century later, the entrenched church culture of the day pushed their little movement to the very margins.
The Scripture story by which we live is about the conflict between two Kingdoms and their respective cultures – The Kingdom of this world with its powers and principalities versus the Kingdom of God, so radically proclaimed by Jesus.
The story of redemption is about ‘culture change’ – it’s being birthed into God’s kingdom, a new heart and a new mind leading to new attitudes and new behaviours. Discipleship is about the lifelong, intentional reflecting on our attitudes and behaviours in the light of God’s calling. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
The people of God are to be this peculiar ‘halfway’ people – journeying from Egypt to the Promised Land with God. Learning to put off the mental bondage of captivity and becoming the free covenant people of God – a Light to the nations!
And yet the Bible is marked by struggle, failure, grace and redemption. The people of God are always struggling to leave behind the gods of Egypt and Canaan. Every Judge and every King of Israel struggles with entrenched culture. Which god are we serving? Which belief system? The tribes and clans of Canaan are married into and slowly their culture becomes endemic and Yahweh is marginalised. All through the stories of the Judges and Kings there is a downward spiral ending in exile to Babylon – and then grace, and God grows a new shoot from the dead stump.
In the New Testament most of the letters are written to deal with cultural issues – almost none of the Pauline epistles are about ‘vision’ or ‘governance’ or ‘programmes’ – it’s all about Jewish legalistic culture or Gentile permissiveness or Gnostic super spirituality or the spirit of Rome – humanity’s greatest attempt at heaven on earth contrasted to the Kingdom of God’s culture - and it’s very painful for Paul and the other leaders! Two steps forward, one step back!
The history of God’s church is the same – The slide into Christendom with Constantine through the valiant resistance of martyrs like Jan Hus, culminated in Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenberg cathedral door and unleashing a chaotic, powerful reaction to the decadent culture of the medieval church.
The evangelical movements or ‘Awakenings’ of the 18th and 19th century revolted against the immovably, nationalistic state churches of the era. You see it in the evolution of the various movements such as the Wesleyans, the Salvationists, the various Disciples, Adventists, Brethren, and Baptists. These various ‘waves’ - overseas missions, Pentecostalism, assorted para-church movements, the church growth era, and the emerging church all emerged in response to ossified church culture and each birthed fresh, fluid expressions of faith.
Our own Churches of Christ tribe tumbled out of such turbulence. How wonderful that the radical Moravian slogan of four hundred years before should also mark our movement of two hundred years hence! “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things love.” The rich chaos of the Spirit of that time spawned many related but divergent movements. Movements always diverge and differentiate into more sharply defined entities. Out of the turbulence of the Judges, comes the sombre orderliness of Kings! Movements have always become ministries and then machines and then slowly un-noticed by their now conservative guardians, they freeze into stone monuments. But God in his grace sows seeds into the cracks of the weathering stone and new green shoots emerge.
We don’t want to be like the good proprietors of Cobb and Co anxiously peering out at the noisy T-model Fords puttering along asphalt roads and then turning to design a better horse! Cobb and Co exists no more! In a few years the motorcar will either be in terminal decline or will have re-invented itself for a new age. We pray for a cultural shift. How can we avoid either being immersed in consumer modernity or fortressed off from the world in a 1950s bubble.
What we aspire for our churches is cultural shift: A missionary paradigm; a bible-narrative from which to live; a contextual mission mindset; a centripetal culture, a discipleship culture, an incarnational mindset; an empowering leadership; a ‘sent’ membership and so on. This is not about change of programs but change of paradigm.
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