Yeshua Explored
The Church and COVID – part 2
What else did the Church think it had learnt?
(This series of articles was written a year after the first lockdown in March/April 2021)
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
Continuing from last week …
- That we have done remarkably well, considering …
How British. Keep calm and carry on / make do / stiffen the upper lip. We’re a resilient people, let’s not forget the Blitz spirit (as long as you are 90+). The Church is adaptable, it has just “reinvented itself”, according to Justin Welby. All this is true and only a true cynic would read this as a bit of a sneer. The fact is that the Church is still trundling on, much as it has always done, working behind the scenes, offering comfort, running food banks, volunteering buildings as vaccination centres, commenting on social concerns. Doing ‘remarkably well’ is a subjective statement and one would not expect any church leader to think otherwise. It paints a picture of surviving against the odds, attempting to keep things moving, making sacrifices and expecting others to follow suit. But … do we think that God would have the same optimism and cheery sentiment about the responses to the pandemic over the last couple of years? You may want to pause and think about this and we will return to this a little later.
- That Church is all about people and not buildings
This is one thing the Church definitely has learnt, though it took a pandemic to drive the point home and reverse the political mindset that forced a mistranslation of the Greek word ‘Ekklesia’ to imply that the Church was a building or organisation, rather than a collection of redeemed people, who needed neither buildings nor organisations. I’ve even seen it on tee-shirts, to show that it has even permeated popular culture (at least within Christian circles). Popular slogans include: the Church is not a building, the Church is a people and the Church has left the building. Only time will tell if this is just a blip and whether we will return to the wasteful bondage of spending an inordinate amount of time and resources in the servicing of real-estate. A leaked C of E document has suggested that around 20% of congregants won’t be returning to these buildings and that clergy numbers could be cut by as much as 20% in some parishes.
- That we all need to be patient and make do until real Church returns
There’s the rub. Real Church. What’s that? How do we know that ‘Church as we know it’ is actually the real thing anyway? This is dangerous thinking and Henry VIII would have had me burned at the stake for such a sentiment. I’m hoping our current royal is a little more forgiving. The fact is that the main thrust of Flockdown was to consider such possibilities, that perhaps there was a wake-up call intended in the shape of a spiky virus. Where all else had failed to reform the Church, perhaps something a little more drastic, unavoidable and significant was needed, something with the power to stop the world dead in its tracks! This current book has been written to continue the story and to think hard about what exactly is Real Church?
- That change is neither required nor necessary
Following on from the above, here is why God had to act in such a way. If the lesson has not been learned, however well it may have been taught, however much it may have been needed, then how different is the Church from the following, from the pages of the Bible? There’s a story in Jeremiah 28:
In the fifth month of that same year, the fourth year, early in the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, the prophet Hananiah son of Azzur, who was from Gibeon, said to me in the house of the Lord in the presence of the priests and all the people:“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: ‘I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.Within two years I will bring back to this place all the articles of the Lord’s house that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon removed from here and took to Babylon. I will also bring back to this place Jehoiachin] son of Jehoiakim king of Judah and all the other exiles from Judah who went to Babylon,’ declares the Lord, ‘for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’”
Then the prophet Jeremiah replied to the prophet Hananiah before the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord. He said, “Amen! May the Lord do so! May the Lord fulfill the words you have prophesied by bringing the articles of the Lord’s house and all the exiles back to this place from Babylon. Nevertheless, listen to what I have to say in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people: From early times the prophets who preceded you and me have prophesied war, disaster and plague against many countries and great kingdoms. But the prophet who prophesies peace will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord only if his prediction comes true.”
Then the prophet Hananiah took the yoke off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah and broke it,and he said before all the people, “This is what the Lord says: ‘In the same way I will break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon off the neck of all the nations within two years.’” At this, the prophet Jeremiah went on his way. After the prophet Hananiah had broken the yoke off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “Go and tell Hananiah, ‘This is what the Lord says: You have broken a wooden yoke, but in its place you will get a yoke of iron. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: I will put an iron yoke on the necks of all these nations to make them serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and they will serve him. I will even give him control over the wild animals.’”
Then the prophet Jeremiah said to Hananiah the prophet, “Listen, Hananiah! The Lord has not sent you, yet you have persuaded this nation to trust in lies. Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I am about to remove you from the face of the earth. This very year you are going to die, because you have preached rebellion against the Lord.’”
In the seventh month of that same year, Hananiah the prophet died.
What a story! God either had to be with Jeremiah or Hananiah. One was right and one was wrong. Hananiah spoke what the people wanted to hear, a rosy tale of peace and restoration. Jeremiah spoke what God wanted the people to hear, a realistic tale of disaster and exile, consistent with previous messages from trusted prophets. The one who was wrong was to suffer a premature death for his lies. It’s not an exact parallel with the situation with the Church today but the principal is what counts. You follow what God is saying, whatever the consequences. If change is required because that is a clear word from God, then the change is necessary and the act of not changing is rebellion … and that is most unwise. I may be wrong here in what current events are suggesting. I hope to be a Jeremiah rather than a Hananiah, but I suppose only time will tell.
- That God does not bring plagues (any more)
Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” (Exodus 3:6)
He is also the God of Noah (Genesis 6:7), Sodom (Genesis 19:24), Canaan (Joshua 6:21), Baal Pe’or (Numbers 25:9) …
‘Nuff said (from me, anyway. If you have any issues, then you know Who to take them up with).
- That the Church has become more transparent and accountable
Really? Then we must have entered a ‘golden age’. Ironically, in parallel to the ‘exposure of past sins’ in our current culture, the Church has, sadly, not been exempt. So many of our leaders have had their flaws exposed, both historical and current, and much of this has filtered into the secular media, which is not a good witness. What it shows us is that despite Biblical teachings that stress the need for personal holiness and godly behaviour that should flow from this, we may promote a glorious message of hope and purity … but we are hard pressed to live the life! Of course, there are always going to be bad apples, the Bible has a whole orchard of them, but we need the world to know that this is not the norm, that believing in Jesus should also involve living like him and representing him. So, when you hear that the Church has become more transparent and accountable … perhaps it’s best if you leave the room at that point, unless you wish to run the risk of an uncomfortable atmosphere!
- That we are seeing a new Reformation
A new Reformation, eh? Here’s how I’ve seen it described, by Mark Dyer, an Anglican bishop. ‘About every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalised Christianity, whatever they may be at the time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur’. This can be seen in the 6th century with Gregory the Great in the era labelled as ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ or ‘The coming of the Dark Ages’. The second 500-year reformation is the 1054 Great Schism that ensured the wedging of Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Roman Catholicism. The third reformation is the Great Reformation, which officially took its course on 31 October 1517 when Luther produced his 95 theses in Wittenberg. It is important to note that the radical change in the 16th century was largely theological. The current reformation, as seen in the Emerging Church and Fresh Expressions movements, is not so much a reformation of faith (the essential theological principles of the Reformation) but a reformation of practice. A major difference is that the 16th century reformation came in reaction to a corrupt and apostate church. The current reformation is a reaction to the irrelevance of the church in relation to the Gospel and its mission’.
Mr Dyer is an exponent of the ‘Emergent Church’ and a lot of what he has said here was first propounded by Phyllis Tickle, one of the leaders of this movement. I would argue that what they see as ‘reformation’ I would see as a misunderstanding and a misreading of the purpose of the Gospel. By his standards the current Church is irrelevant because it doesn’t conform with the prevailing culture, so the ‘Emergent Church’, that has compromised much of its absolutes, somehow represents a ‘new reformation’.
It’s not that a new Reformation is not needed. It is certainly needed but we wait for God to speak on this before we act, rather than be informed by such post-modernist issues as relevance, tolerance and compromise.
This is where we are in terms of what I think that the Church thinks about what it has learnt in the ‘Year of Covid’. So, from my observations, what do I think the Church has actually learnt?
This is an extract from the book, Flockdown Church: Back to the drawing board?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-church-278-p.asp
