COMMENT - Reinventing Church

There seems to be a pervasive instinct within Evangelical Christianity. You might call it an instinct for reinventing church.

Perennially confronted by the imperfections of humanity - and the impact this has upon its attempts to build Christian communities that live up to the call of the Gospel - Evangelical theologians, pastors and laypeople regularly scour the New Testament in search of a more biblically faithful understanding of Church. Today, the search continues with the House Church and Emergent "movements".

Two features appear common to these efforts: First, they are born of a passionate desire to obey Christ and establish Christian communities that honor him, strengthens believers and bears faithful witness to the Gospel. Second, they speak of the church first and foremost as a notional reality.

What strikes me as odd about these efforts at reinventing church is that each of them neglects to take into account the actual, living community that Christ himself called into existence during his earthly ministry. They ignore the fact that when our Lord and the Apostles spoke of the Church - they had a specific community in view.... a community that even the gates of hell could not confound (Matthew 16:13-19).

It seems to me that implicit in this effort is the settled conviction that the Church that Christ actually founded has ceased to exist. If this is in fact what happened - if the original church failed - then I am left to wonder why any of us ought to waste our time trying to reinvent church at all. If the God-Man himself couldn't get it right, then why should mere mortals even try?