Justin Bieber was recently spotted on a California beach sporting a new tattoo on his left calf: the sorrowful face of Jesus Christ. But the pop star says he has no need for the church. “A lot of people who are religious, I think they get lost. They go to church just to go to church,” he says in a cover story for an entertainment magazine. “I’m not trying to disrespect them . . . but for me, I focus more on praying and talking to Him. I don’t have to go to church.”
Now comes a Newsweek cover story (April 2, 2012) with a hipster Jesus walking in Times Square and the headline: FORGET THE CHURCH—FOLLOW JESUS. Subtitle: “Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists.” Ignore the church, writes Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Jesus. OK, let’s all agree that the institutional church is broken and compromised, but can we really afford to “forget it”?
What about “church-less” Christianity? Can we really follow Jesus in private—like working out with a personal trainer, and never being part of an athletic team? Is Christian faith like getting personal psychotherapy, or more like the give and take of a 12-step recovery group? Is it like sitting at a table for one, or like attending an exuberant dinner party?
The personal aspect of faith is vital and foundational. God does desire to speak to us directly and intimately. But—when we look at the Bible we discover that God’s saving purpose in the world is intensely communal. In fact, God’s goal is a reconciled human race, a new society where all God’s divided children are drawn back together into one. This is happening, and can only happen, through the social miracle we call “church.”
Distinction: Church in the biblical sense does not mean “religious ritual” or “bureaucratic tyranny.” Whatever communal practices we engage in under the umbrella of “church” have only one purpose—to re-connect us with our Creator and with one another. Mindless ritual for ritual’s sake is what many people reject when they say that church is irrelevant. But being called together by God’s Spirit, getting healed of our lonely and fractious egotism and receiving adoption into a secure and loyal family—this is relevant to our most basic human needs. Coercive domination is not what church is about either. Rather it’s about learning how to serve one another.
The Bible begins with the statement that God created us in his image and after his likeness. “God is love,” and so our destiny is to flourish in the environment of divine love and to reflect that love to each other. “It is not good for man to be alone,” God says. He creates Adam and Eve in such a way that they must depend on each other to find fulfillment. God could have created us to reproduce asexually via fragmentation (like worms and fungi) or parthenogenesis (like certain plants and fish). Sexual inter-dependence is a sign of God’s design for families, communities, nations, and the entire human civilization that will flow from the union of Adam and Eve. Human beings were not created to be self-sufficient. We need one another.
But God’s purpose to create a human community that reflects his image has been frustrated by a chronic turning away from the divine source of our life. Starting with Adam, our desire to be autonomous from God has turned history into a horror story of hubris, greed, violence and division. The Bible reveals God’s repeated interventions to rescue the human race from self-generated chaos. God breaks into history and reveals his gracious promise of a new world through the “covenants” he enacts with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David. These covenants are always social and holistic in nature, restoring God’s presence to the land and the community.
Salvation is a social event. In the Bible story, God is not just transforming individuals. He is redeeming the creation, setting in motion a social and cultural renewal that will eventually embrace all nations. Throughout this history Israel is called as God’s chosen people to bear witness to a new way of being human. God’s election of a special people is for the purpose of giving the world a public model of human wholeness—what the Hebrew prophets called “shalom.”
At last, Jesus comes as the ultimate revelation of the divine image. A new covenant. God with us. Love incarnate. He re-connects alienated men and women with God through forgiveness and healing. And he re-connects broken people to one another by forming a community whose ultimate value is love—to love God with one’s whole heart, and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. Christ’s revolution of love was opposed by the political and religious powers of his age. The forces of chaos would not roll over without a fight. Christ died for love. But love conquered when God raised him from the grave.
What is Jesus’ legacy? The Son of God did not leave behind a system of religious philosophy. He didn’t write anything. He created a community, an assembly (Gk. ekklesia) founded on himself and propagated through the witness of twelve apostles. The old age of human disintegration is judged and destroyed on the cross. The new humanity is raised up with Jesus on the third day. As risen Lord, he promises to indwell this community, “Christ in us the hope of glory.” That is why, throughout the New Testament, salvation is represented by such corporate images as “the family of God,” “the body of Christ,” and “the fellowship of the Spirit.” Salvation is a social event.
Jesus also left behind spiritual practices we call sacraments. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are material signs of his death and resurrection. Like a powerful magnet, the sacraments attach us to Christ’s self-giving love which all creation is predestined to reflect. These are not meaningless rites, but tangible assurances of our incorporation into God’s new creation. Church is the earthly fellowship that participates in Christ’s death and resurrection. Ancient church buildings were built in the shape of a cross to represent the sacramental reality that we are gathered into the heart of God’s suffering love—embraced by a love that will not let us go.
So what’s wrong with the idea of “church-less” Christianity? First, we need to remember that commitment to Christ, no matter how sincere, has a way of evaporating if not reinforced by the communal channels of God’s grace which bind us together in Christ’s body. Only a new covenant community created by the Holy Spirit is able to fulfill God’s plan for a new society of recovering autocrats and egotists, a counter-culture of grace that resists the violence and greed so ingrained in human nature and human history.
Second, consider this parable on the difference between heaven and hell. We imagine that the hungry inhabitants of hell are seated together around a table of magnificent bounty. Unfortunately they are separated from the feast by an impassible moat. Each resident of hell is provided a spoon with a handle long enough to reach the table, but the handle is so long that it is impossible to return any food to a person’s own mouth. This is their torment day and night—to smell and see a scrumptious meal, but without ever being able to taste it. Turning to heaven, we are surprised to see that it offers precisely the same accommodations. The residents there are also separated from the feast by a wide chasm and provided with spoons with handles long enough to reach the table but too long to return any food to their own mouths. The difference, however, is that in heaven the saints are feeding each other.
The church is the foretaste of such a heaven—“thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.” Salvation is a social event. As the body of Christ, we are “members of one another.” We cannot live alone. We cannot get to heaven alone. To follow Jesus is to be united in a spiritual fellowship shaped by Christ’s death and resurrection, intertwining one another as the earthly branches of a heavenly vine.
