Jan 19, 2012
How Churches Die: Loosing Sight of Repentance
Posted by Pastor Todd Murphy in | Comments (0)
The Church has been around for a long time now, about two thousand years. That is a long time for bad things to happen, and to be sure, she was never picture perfect. The formation of orthodoxy came painfully. It was the threat of heresy that made the church define orthodoxy. When we look at some of the oldest traditions, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, it is easy to pick on them. The older something is, the more time it has to have problems, especially when its lead by sinners.
What is ironic about most of these oldest Christian traditions is that as regards what they officially teach and practice, the differences are slight in many cases. Sure they have a lot of differences in the details, but in regard to their core doctrines and practices, they are still much the same. All share a commitment to the catholic Creeds (Apostle’s, Nicene, and Chalcedon). They all continue the most basic practices of the Church that we find in Acts 2:42 (preached word, sacraments, community, and prayer liturgy). However it is not uncommon to hear not only evangelicals who left those traditions, but even unchurched folk refer to these as lifeless, legalistic, wrote, ritualistic, hypocritical, and above all “dead.” This may be a legitimate criticism in some cases. But then here is the question we need to ask: If these have to one degree or another maintained core Christian beliefs and the practices we find in the New Testament, why have so many of them seemed to go bad and show little fruit of the Spiritual life?
The Sacramentalized Church
A friend of mine who is a faithful Roman Catholic recently made the following observation. She has described her own communion as “sacramentalized.” What she means by this is that the sacraments and liturgy have been raised to the sum total of what it means to be Christian. The sacramentalized Church is one where the worshipper mechanically participates in attending, the sacraments, liturgy etc. as a mindless act of obedience. Exposed for what it really is, it is a form of idolatry that ultimately thinks like this: “I will do religious things that will make God happy with me so he will leave the rest of my life alone.” No nobody thinks it out quite this sharply. But that is the point. The sacrametalized person does not really want to think about God. They are going through the motions of religion, not actually practicing it by faith. So he or she is doing what they think is the bare minimum of what God wants to get by so they do not have to hand over the rest of their life.
We Protestant and Evangelicals are of course kidding ourselves by thinking we are any less sacramentalized. We actually do the same thing, just in more creative ways. The mistake that we usually make is blaming this dead religious observance on Church practice itself. The logic goes something like this: “those traditional churches only go through the motions of creeds and sacraments, therefore we need to get rid of tradition and the ‘dead letter’ and just focus on the heart.” However those things (creeds, liturgy, sacraments) are not actually the cause of the problem. Remember that the sacraments, theology and creeds come from Jesus and the Apostles. They can all be found to one degree or another in the Bible. Jesus instituted baptism and the Lord’s table himself. There are creeds throughout the Bible too (e.g. Deut. 26:5-10). And a substantial part of the Bible is in fact liturgy, particularly the Psalms and Gospels. In fact one of the key criteria the early Church used in the selection of the New Testament was their suitability for use in the liturgy. So any thinking Christian is going to have to admit that what Jesus gave to his Church is not the problem. It is a matter of stewardship---what we do with them. They only serve as guide wires or lines marking the playing field. They will not in and of themselves produce spiritual life. When we expect them to, trouble is ahead. Thus the problem is not with the historic worship practices and beliefs of the church. It is thinking that the mere wrote observance of them will automatically produce spiritual life. The institutional structures of the church are like enzymes, they are catalysts to enhance spiritual life. But they are not the thing itself.
The Gospel of Repentance
Have you ever noticed that both Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are directly tied to repentance in the New Testament? Baptism introduces the individual to the church, a community where we make disciples by teaching them how to practice repentance (Mark 1:4 & Luke 3:3). The Lord’s supper also demands that we practice self examination every time we come together (1 Cor. 11:28). These sacraments and liturgy were not meant to create spiritual life, but to facilitate and nourish it. God creates spiritual life by his Spirit. The forms of the Church’s worship are only “means of grace” by which the Spirit stimulates, nurtures, and guides us in it.
So the question then is this: If these Old Church tradition have so much right, why have so many of them gone liberal, or are just going through the motions? First we need to consider that they may not be dead, but you just think they are because they do not worship like you. Second, where the criticism is true, the answer is the loss of preaching repentance. Having theological knowledge about God, and practicing the knowledge of God through repentance are not the same thing. These older Church traditions have failed is in the department of preaching. Wherever a robust preaching of repentance is planted, the seeds of spiritual life take root. Where the Church fails to preach repentance, faith withers and the Church with it. In the end we are left with an empty facade with no real substance inside.
Churches do not go dead from contending for right doctrine, the sacraments, or by using a liturgy. I know of many vibrant churches who do all of these. But they do not remain spiritually vibrant by merely retaining these elements either! These are only co-facilitators in the process of spiritual nurture. Community, sacraments, liturgy, prayer, and any other faith activity can only come along side the preaching and practice of repentance. Churches go dead from a failure in preaching the true Gospel and a clear call to repentance.
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