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The loss of church as public
My first location for this post is as a church planter, trying to grow a church in the post Christian, secular materialist, and post church context of Europe. What does it mean within this context to try to establish a vibrant church community that enables Christian’s formation and grow in faith, and for people in our local community to convert to that form of life, as Christians, in and through our church plant?Alastair MacIntyre has demonstrated how practices are prior to institutions, and yet good practices are only sustained over time by institutions. However those very institutions over time corrupt and undermine the good practices they were set in place for.
In referencing MacIntyre, I betray my second locations for this post, of being within ‘emerging church’ discussions and conversations (whether others consider me legitimately located within this context is another question).
Within my context the protestant church has seemingly retreated into the subjective private gnosis of ‘relevance’ with it’s myriad progressions of worship aesthetics, be that charismatic revivalism, purpose driveness, or alternative worship, whilst on the other hand it has turned to a reified and objectified faith around some form of biblical fundamentalism.
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Is there still a need for church - true, deep or otherwise?
The Pope recently reconfirmed the Roman Catholic’s church position that only churches with apostolic succession are true churches, for those of us in the protestant tradition we are ‘ecclesiological communities.’ This may lead some to wonder whether we as protestants/evangelicals can have any truck with our Catholic brothers and sisters and perhaps deep church is at best a sticking plaster for ecumenicalism or at worst some sort of consipiracy/cover up/hush up/suck up?In these revolutionary post-church/pathological-church times I wonder if we need to move beyond arguements of legitimising our existence as gathering of Christians and instead address the question facing us in the west of why we should bother gathering at all?
Do we still resonate with the thoughts of Ignatius, from the 2nd century, that ‘where Jesus Christ is, there is the universal church’ or Irenaeus, ”where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and all grace’ or does that church now only consist of an audience of one - namely me (as pope, priest and parishioner).
Is chosing to be an independent/individual Christian a contradiction in terms? What can the deep church/deep ecclesiology response be to the question of not just defining “church” but addressing the questions of church: “so what?” and “then what?”
Whilst acknowleding the dangers of blueprint church and the romantic quest in vain for the perfect church - I think we also need to critique our own western ecclesiological lens and inparticular the underlying theme of individualisation/self-determination. My own suggested sketch for this critique for me would be for a Trinitarian lens - one informed by a 2/3 world view [where they have the opposite dilema an emphasis on the many but not so much on the individual].
