Back in my Southern Baptist days, I used to hear church planters and denominational leaders talk about creating “New Testament churches.” The more closely I read the New Testament, the more I wondered with a chuckle, “Which ones?”
Let’s see. There’s the Corinthian church – the one divided into four factions, where some members ate all the food at the weekly potluck and let others go hungry, and one member was openly sleeping with his stepmother. There’s the Johannine church that split down the middle over Gnosticism. Then there are the churches of Galatia that all started strong, but quickly caved in to the pressures of conservative legalists who told them Paul was a liar and they must strictly follow the Jewish law code. At the church in Rome, people of Jewish background and those raised in Gentile homes were distrustful and resentful of each other. The Jerusalem church was more promising, though I haven’t seen any contemporary American church show the slightest interest in common ownership of goods. Paul seemed to have nothing but good to say about the Macedonian churches, praising them for their overwhelming generosity despite their poverty. In most American churches today, average giving is less than 3% of annual income.
So there are some really bad examples of church in the New Testament, and the really good examples are hardly ever taken seriously as models for today. Maybe what we should strive for is not “New Testament churches” but churches that seek to live by New Testament principles.
For instance, the New Testament consistently holds up the principle of stewardship – the ethical teaching that human beings do not really own anything but are stewards of all we have and, therefore, are accountable to God for how we use those resources. Finance teams, trustees, and any other group in a local church charged with deciding how to use money, the building, and any other material resources ought to remind themselves of this principle every time they meet.
Another basic principle found in the New Testament is humility – the ethic of putting the needs of others ahead of one’s own needs. In our consumerist culture, the focus has become exactly the opposite – churches appeal to prospective church members by promising to “meet their needs” better than the church down the road. Consequently, people drift away from their congregations when their needs are no longer being met. When and how do we train disciples who look to the needs of others?
A third principal taught by the New Testament is hospitality – making room for and welcoming the stranger. While I suspect just about every congregation claims to embrace this value, two common tendencies get in the way. One is the need for conformity, either doctrinal or behavioral, or both. In other words, strangers are welcomed only conditionally, and the perceived role of the church is to help them “see the light,” rather than consider what light they might bring to the congregation. The other tendency is to confuse hospitality with “fellowship.” Congregations that pride themselves on being friendly, I’ve discovered over the years, are more often than not cliquish and therefore difficult to enter. The stranger is welcomed at first, but never really included, and those who are “in fellowship” with each other cannot see how insular their club has become.
A fourth principal is faith. By this, I mean the kind of faith that Jesus spoke of – dependence on God for every day. To be faithful means that we will be in prayer – not only during worship, and not just at the beginning and end of committee meetings, but whenever we are gathered, whether to study the Scriptures or deliberate over church matters. It means that we never forget to thank God for every blessing we experience in church and, when we face a challenge, we never forget to seek God’s direction. Sometimes, “faith” gets cheapened in local churches as a last resort when everything else has failed. That’s why so-called “faith budgets” get adopted – not because the budget faithfully represents how the congregation believes God is leading them to do ministry, but because they can’t make the numbers add up. “Faith,” then, becomes an almost tongue-in-cheek excuse for not being financially responsible.
One more principle I’ll hold up here (though certainly there are others that need our attention) is agape, the New Testament word for love. It is not a feeling. It is not affection of any kind. We know this because Jesus commands us to have this love, and you cannot command a feeling. Agape is the unselfish, unconditional love of God that expects nothing in return. There is no quid pro quo in Christian community. We grant each other respect and dignity as people for whom Christ died. We see each other as God sees us. Of course, growing into agape is a lifelong process that requires openness to God’s Spirit at work in us, for we cannot call forth this quality of love from within ourselves. To practice agape is to channel God’s love, and not simply express our own.
I find no evidence from scripture that churches in the first century of Christianity were any more or less capable of embodying these principles than any church today. The extent to which we are truly the body of Christ is not a function of our historical proximity to the earthly ministry of Jesus but rather our spiritual proximity to the risen Christ. More important than being a “New Testament church,” which may or may not be a good thing, is striving to be a “Christ-centered church.”
Copyright 2010 by J. Mark Lawson
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