The Role of the Church in Spiritual Theology
Addressing a major neglect
There is something I see pretty frequently in spiritual formation circles that I find deeply troubling. It goes something like this:
Someone buys into a view of spiritual practices and spiritual formation as a kind of virtue formation.
That view is entirely based on a generic account of formation.
The church, if it is talked about at all, is judged solely according to naturalistic assumptions (so that a sermon becomes a lecture, worship becomes music, the body of Christ becomes community, etc.).
The church is then judged to be faulty, and there is a cry to rethink everything from the ground up.
It is interesting to see this sort of thing back in the water, because it is exactly what Willow Creek was doing several decades ago. The approach was to start with secular standards and assumptions and then reduce the church down into a secular sort of enterprise, judging it by secular metrics. Unsurprisingly, this has gone poorly.
Now, I say this as someone whose whole family became Christians at Willow Creek. I owe that place a lot. The Lord was kind to my family, and a lot of people heard the gospel there that might not have. We can still affirm the good that came out of that place, and the proper focus on evangelism, while we name all that was wrong with it.
In light of all of this, I want to say something about the nature of the church, but more specifically, one of the roles a notion of “church” should play in your mind. What do I mean by that?
One of the questions we have to ask when we’re thinking Christianly about something is what role do our various beliefs have with one another, and how do our beliefs about these things give shape to our other beliefs. For instance, if you believe in infant baptism, that is never going to remain an isolated belief. That is not just something you tack on the side of your belief system. That will guide and shape a lot of other beliefs you hold about what the covenant community is, what sacraments are, how God relates to his people in and through the structure of the church, etc.
One thing I think the church should do for us, in our belief system, is that it should judge our views of formation. In other words, if we have a view of spiritual formation where the church is unnecessary, where the church becomes a secular institution, or where the church and its practices are seen as optional add-ons to the Christian life, you’ve ceased to have a view of Christian spiritual formation.
The church is an amazing institution established by God that clearly works. Everyone knows this. We know it works because of how much it hurts us. There is a reason we have so many people who rally together because of their injury from the church, but we don’t have the same phenomenon with Costco (to use an example from a friend of mine). I don’t take lightly the injury and abuse from the church, it is one of the most significant forms of evil warping the world today. But the very fact that the church hurts us shows us the nature of its power. The power of the church is the same thing as the power of our family, another institution that reveals its depth by how deeply it can both establish us and hurt us.
None of this says that the church shouldn’t be doing more. But most of the critiques of the church use secular metrics. We have metrics, but they are the fruit of the Spirit, and require differing sorts of discernment.
Where all of this leads us is to say simply this: The church is not something we tack on to the end of our system of belief. This would be the equivalent of coming up with a vision of your life, that is fully worked out, and then tacking-on your spouse and kids at the end. No. Those are the very things that need to give shape to your life. A church is not simply a community, a place to learn lessons, or a place to sing with other people. A church is a part of a holy people where we are to hold “fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.” (Col. 2:19)
The church is the place where we draw near as a people, knowing ourselves as brothers and sisters in Christ, and members in a singular body. The church is the place where we learn that love “does not insist on its own way” (1 Cor. 13:5), and where we submit to one another in love. None of this is insignificant in our life with the Lord and our calling to be growing in love.