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The Aquila Report

Faithfulness Is the Future of the Church

By Carl R. Trueman — 3 years ago

Faithfulness Is the Future of the Church

To regain its reputation, authority, and influence, the church in the world must first be faithful to the gospel message in teaching and practice. But it must also be the place where awe and wonder before a holy God can still captivate even the nonbeliever.

To answer that question, it is first useful to outline the nature of the problems that have brought traditional Christian churches to this moment. There are, of course, the obvious matters of hypocrisy and moral corruption. The child abuse and financial scandals within the Roman Catholic Church, combined with the institutionalized cover-ups of the same, are the most infamous examples of such. Yet Protestantism, too, has its equivalents and the only reason it has perhaps proved less notorious in the public imagination is due to its fragmentation, rendering the scandals more piecemeal and less visible on the national scale. For both expressions of Christianity, however, such corruption renders any public statement that claims the moral high ground on a wide variety of issues implausible, if not downright hypocritical, in the eyes of the public and indeed many Christians.

Beyond the scandals, there is the general tilt against traditional institutional authority. This does not merely affect churches, as attitudes toward political institutions indicate. But it does hit churches particularly hard because, unlike the Senate, for example, they are not necessary for society to function. Churches have a voluntary dimension that has always meant that their authority is highly attenuated. Freedom of religion is a very good thing, but it does shift power toward the congregant, who can easily behave like a customer, and away from the clergy, who may find that they have to behave more like salespeople to attract and keep their flock. And in a world where institutional authority in general is seen as less and less plausible, today even the attenuated church power of the recent past starts to look exceptionally ambitious.

To all this we might add the role of technology. The invention of the automobile might be said to have been the real shattering blow to church authority, as it allowed individuals easy access to an even greater range of churches. Now the internet has more or less abolished geography in its entirety. A person in Florida can, if they wish, be part of a church service in Rome as long as it is streamed on the web. And this can be at a time of the person’s choosing. We might say that technology in the form of the internet has not only further eroded institutional power in practice, but it has also reshaped how we imagine our relationship to the church. The customer now really can be king over space and time. And the time of COVID served to supercharge this because most, if not all, Christians had to worship online for a time, and many priests and pastors have seen their returning congregations diminished as a result.

In light of these problems, how might the church recover its integrity and authority?

The first thing to note is that credibility with the world outside the church is not something to be desired in an unqualified manner. The New Testament makes it clear that the church is not a continuous part of the wider culture. The message of the cross is foolishness to Greeks and an offense to Jews, as Paul argues in 1 Corinthians. That sets limits to the church’s plausibility in the wider culture and indicates that a church that is not at some level offensive to that wider culture is likely not articulating the gospel in a correct manner. Christians are, to use Peter’s language, sojourners and exiles or, in the cliche of earlier generations of believers, in the world but not of it. This is not an excuse for gratuitous offense or implausibility, but it is a reminder that being repudiated by the secular world is not necessarily a sign that the church is at fault.

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