September 2003 marked a turning point in the development of Western civilization.” So begins an intriguing study by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.30
That was the month that Adbusters magazine started accepting orders for the Black Spot Sneaker, its own signature brand of “subversive” running shoes. After that day, no rational person could possibly believe that there is a tension between “mainstream” and “alternative” culture. After that day, it became obvious to everyone that cultural rebellion, of the type epitomized by Adbusters magazine, was not a threat to the system — it is the system.
Subversive running shoes! Seriously? The radical is now ordinary and “countercultural” now simply defines culture. Alternative rock quickly became mainstream. Even the garage band that pioneers a new sound is soon a commodity owned and marketed. To leave your mark, you have to distinguish your brand in the marketplace. But, of course, that means that pop culture simply is opposed to culture — that is, not only to current offerings, but to anything and everything that has gone before it. You can’t just build ingeniously on the wisdom of the past, you have to reinvent. Even sneakers have to be “subversive.”
Enamored of its reported amazingness, each generation razes the empire to its foundations and starts over until the next generation has its own go at it. This means, of course, that everyone born of a woman must feel deep inside the primal duty to shake things up.
The problem is that there is little left to rebel against — and certainly little that has been around long enough to represent a tradition to overthrow. No longer stone fortresses, our “Bastilles” become Styrofoam sets on a Disney stage. The reforming of something substantial has enduring influence. But perpetual reinvention dooms cultures — and churches — to passing shadows of momentary glamour with few lasting legacies beyond the trivial. How can I say that with so much confidence? Because the engineers and marketers of each new movement themselves report with thorough analysis the demise of the one that just preceded theirs.
Perpetual shock is the new normal in the church as well. It seems like Jesus needs rebranding every couple of decades. Commonly, the rhetoric of radical in our churches actually mirrors our culture, even when — no, especially when — it invokes the lingo of “countercultural,” “subversive,” “alternative,” “extreme,” and so forth. The likes of Athanasius, Augustine, Bernard, Luther, and Calvin sought to reform the church. But for centuries now radical Protestants have been trying to reboot, reinvent, start over, and reconstitute the real church of the true saints over against the ordinary churches. For that level of enthusiasm, of course, you have to be in a state of perpetual innovation, like Apple and Black Spot Sneaker.
Each new wave of revival rushes in like a tsunami and carries much of the settled coastline out to sea. While in past ages faithfulness was measured by continuity, every new movement has to prove itself in the market by the extent to which it breaks away from everything that has gone before it. To parody the last line in the observation above about the Adbusters magazine, ecclesiastical rebellion is not a threat to the system — it is the system. In fact, historians give us a lot of reasons to believe that evangelical Protestantism today is being shaped by the cult of perpetual novelty.
Every now and again, of course, things do need to be shaken up. But in our culture it’s hard to know when one earthquake ends and another begins — especially with all of the aftershocks in between. Because the Word of God is “living and active,” always breaking into this present age of sin and death with its penetrating energies of judgment and grace, the church is always subject to correction. That’s what keeps the church from curving in on itself, like any other long-running corporation. Yet this Word doesn’t just tear down, it builds up; and building up takes a long time and care, across many generations. Weeds have to be pulled. Limbs have to be trimmed. Sometimes a tree here or there has to be chopped down before its disease spreads to the other plants. But you don’t bulldoze the garden and start over again.
In his Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has the veteran demon tell his apprentice that “the horror of the same old thing” is “one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart.” The discussion follows about how fashion, novelty, and change will certainly produce an insatiable desire for, ironically, more of the same. “This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns.”31 Here’s more from Screwtape on the matter:
The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding.”32
The present chapter follows naturally from the previous one. After all, the cult of The Next Big Thing is always the assertion of a new generation of emerging adults. Movements are largely youth-driven, whereas institutions are usually run by elders. The challenge, especially in the church where we are drawn together in Christ from different ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and generations, is to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3).
Our culture celebrates The Next Big Thing, but Scripture speaks of an intergenerational covenant of grace. You can’t keep taking your line out of the water, repotting the plant, constantly taking the temperature, or redirecting your entire focus and strategy every minute. You have to let the King run his kingdom, follow his instructions, and become a disciple as well as make them. “A watched pot never boils,” the experienced chef tells her impatient apprentice.
I am not suggesting that traditionalism is a good alternative. Through the Word, the Holy Spirit breaks up the harmonies of this present age. And yet, whenever he tears down, he also builds up. And building up takes time. As G. K. Chesterton observed in 1924:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine.33
The answer to progressivism and traditionalism is the same: being open to the never-changing and yet always-new power of God’s Word as our only norm for faith and practice. So let’s allow the parade to pass us by as it marches behind The Next Big Thing. Instead, let’s do a little spring cleaning each day. There will be some forgotten treasures amid a lot of clutter. “But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good” (1 Thess 5:21 NASB).
The Next Big Thing Is a Tradition
Growing up in evangelical churches, I didn’t think I was shaped by a tradition. In fact, “tradition” was not ordinarily a positive term. We were Bible-believing Christians. We just said and did what the Bible taught. It was others — especially “high church” folks — who followed a tradition. We, however, were just plain Christians.
In reality, though, I was reared in a tradition. It was in many ways a rich and edifying tradition. To be specific, it was evangelical Protestantism of a specific stripe. Often without knowing it, this tradition preserved many elements of orthodox Christianity that many so-called traditional churches were throwing overboard.
Although these churches did not subscribe to creeds and confessions, they were in many ways more committed to orthodox doctrines than many churches that recited them each week. This tradition mediated to me, mostly informally, a basic familiarity with the Bible and a living knowledge of the gospel of salvation by grace, through faith in Christ. Yet this tradition was also the product of the Radical Reformation, pietism, and American revivalism. So the emphases of the Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, sat uncomfortably alongside the more Arminian — even Semi-Pelagian and outright Pelagian — emphases of Charles Finney and Benjamin Franklin. It was the tradition of a distinctly American revivalism with its curious mixture of separatism and civil religion.
Simply identifying the historical sources and trajectories of Christian communities doesn’t stop the conversation (“You have your tradition and I have mine”). On the contrary, it allows us to acknowledge our own tradition, to analyze it in its particulars for faithfulness to Scripture, and to engage other traditions with respect. Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper noted in 1898:
There is, to be sure, a theological illusion abroad . . . which conveys the impression that, with the Holy Scriptures in hand, one can independently construct theology. . . . This illusion is a denial of the historic and organic character of theology, and for this reason is inwardly untrue. No theologian following the direction of his own compass would ever have found by himself what he now confesses and defends on the ground of Holy Scripture. By far the largest part of his results is adopted by him from theological tradition, and even the proofs he cites from Scripture, at least as a rule, have not been discovered by himself, but have been suggested to him by his predecessors.34
One of the prominent Christian “traditions” today is nondenominational evangelicalism. To deny that this is a tradition is to cut off the possibility of internal evaluation, critique, and reform. Ironically, it tends to create the most resistant sort of traditionalism. Bereft of criticism by God’s Word from the past or by representatives of other traditions in the present, allegedly nondenominational and nontraditional churches become bound to their own circle of living Bible teachers, movements, and emphases that have their own unacknowledged history.
For example, the churches of my youth would have said that the church down the street was following tradition rather than Scripture. Yet when I began asking why we didn’t baptize infants, it was hard to find a good explanation beyond “we believe the Bible.” Even at a young age, it caused me to wonder whether that was just another way of saying “we follow our tradition.”
To be clear, I am not saying that there aren’t those who defend their views on topics like this from Scripture, much less that Scripture itself doesn’t give us clear answers. Nor am I saying that tradition determines truth. Yet it is important to recognize that we never come to the Bible as the first Christians, but always as those who have been inducted into a certain set of expectations about what we will find in Scripture. I did not find the doctrine of the Trinity all by myself. It is part of the rich inheritance in the communion of saints from the past and the present. So the best way forward is to respect and evaluate our traditions, not to idolize or ignore them.
The current impulse toward radical Christianity, then, is itself part of a tradition that is rooted in successive waves of radical Protestantism. The magisterial Reformers like Luther and Calvin sought to reform the church, not to start over. Unlike the radicals, they believed the church had continued from the time of the apostles. It was the medieval church that had introduced novelties in doctrine and worship, they argued, and they sought to recover the best of the ancient church. American Christianity — even in denominations that identify as Lutheran and Reformed — have been closer in many ways to the radical sects than to the evangelical Reformers.
The Reformers recognized the supremacy of God’s Word over the church’s doctrine and practice. Yet they also realized that the Spirit illumines the church to understand the inspired text. The history of the church is the story of both the Spirit’s illumination and the ongoing sinfulness of human beings, including believers, to read and follow it properly. Although it is subservient to Scripture, tradition was taken seriously as a guide to interpretation. Creeds and confessions reflected a common understanding of the Bible’s basic teachings. All believers must have equal access to Christ and his Word, but there was no “right of private interpretation.” Rather, we all read the Bible together, submitting to the common mind of the church through its representative bodies.
The Reformers also believed that every believer was a priest, able to go directly to God and to intercede for each other. But they held as firmly that the New Testament appoints pastors to preach, baptize, and administer Communion and elders to supervise the church’s spiritual health.
The Reformers believed that God alone saves. Salvation is not an asset or treasury owned by the hierarchy, to be administered to those who follow the prescribed rules. It is God’s free favor and gift. Nevertheless, they taught just as clearly that God works ordinarily through the ministry of human beings as they preach, baptize, administer the Lord’s Supper, and guide the doctrine and life of believers in Christ’s name.
On each of these points, the radicals went further. The visible church is false; the invisible church of the truly born-again and Spirit-filled must reinvent the church of Acts. The priesthood of all believers meant that every true believer was a minister and could preach, baptize, or serve Communion. And the Spirit works directly and immediately, often through extraordinary revelations. It is not the “outer” Word and sacraments that matter, but the “inner” voice of the Spirit and an inner washing and presence of Jesus apart from water, bread, and wine. Everything that is external, institutional, visible, physical, formal, and official is opposed to that which is internal, individual, invisible, immaterial, and informal. Genuine faith is spontaneous, not mediated through structured ministry. According to Separatist leader John Smyth, those who are “born again . . . should no longer need means of grace,” since the persons of the Godhead “are better than all scriptures, or creatures whatsoever.”35
Though evangelicals today might differ on the details (such as not needing Scripture), John Smyth seems to have won out. No longer reform, but revolution. No longer repairing the ramparts that have fallen, but demolition and reconstruction. No longer ordinary growth — both of believers during their lifetime and churches generally through history — but extraordinary movements would lead us into the age of the Spirit. Authority shifted from the external Word, communally heard, embraced, and lived, to the individual’s experience. All of this raises the question as to the extent to which evangelicalism has, for some time, been as much the facilitator as the victim of modern autonomy.
Every new movement comes with fresh press releases about restoring the fallen church (rather than reforming the partly faithful/partly unfaithful church), a rebirth of the church of Acts, a new Pentecost, and even a rebooting that will change everything. Yet, at the end of the day, they all reflect a fairly unbroken tradition from the radical sects of centuries past. Each movement began as a democratic leveling, eradicating structures, special offices, liturgies, sometimes even preaching and sacraments. And yet, nondenominational movements soon became . . . denominations. Radical innovations soon became unquestioned traditions.
Longing for Revival
A lot of what has distinguished American culture — the cult of celebrity, youthfulness, and innovation — was born on the sawdust trail of the revivalists. The cult of The Next Big Thing — whether a new rock band, a diet fad, a political movement, or a spiritual explosion or religious crusade — is not the result simply of our captivity to culture; the wider cultural phenomenon may never have emerged without revivalism. In a society before TV, revivals were not just influenced by pop culture. They were pop culture.
There are two ways to understand revival. The first is to see it as a “surprising work of God,” God’s “extraordinary blessing on his ordinary means of grace.” That is how Jonathan Edwards saw it, as Ian Murray summarizes.36 God is utterly free to withhold or send revival as he pleases.
The second approach sees revival as something within our control — something that can be staged and managed with predictable results. If you follow the right steps, you’ll get the right outcomes. Basically, it’s a technological approach to religion. Like a genie in a bottle, even God is subject to the laws of cause and effect. In the words of the nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Finney (a key promoter of this second view), “A revival is not a miracle or dependent on a miracle in any sense. It is simply the philosophical result of the right use of means like any other effect.” The radical Protestant impulse for extraordinary evidence, through extraordinary methods, became especially pronounced with Charles Finney. Finney defined his “new measures” as “inducements sufficient to convert sinners with.”37
Ironically, beneath the veneer of an outpouring of the Spirit, this sort of revivalism was more like deism: God had set up these laws and now it’s up to us. I get the same feeling when I encounter prosperity evangelists. For all the talk of miracles, these wonders turn out to be natural after all. Follow the prescribed steps and you get your miracle. Do you even really need God in this sort of scheme, except as the architect who set everything up this way?
Constant pressure was placed on the ingenuity of the evangelist to keep up the emotional temperature. Not only an extraordinary conversion experience at the beginning, but perpetual shaking and quaking are necessary. “A revival will decline and cease,” Finney warned, “unless Christians are frequently re-converted.”38 A revival could be planned, staged, and managed. The Great Commission just said, “Go,” according to Finney. “It did not prescribe any forms. It did not admit any. . . . And [the disciples’] object was to make known the gospel in the most effectual way . . . so as to obtain attention and secure obedience of the greatest number possible. No person can find any form of doing this laid down in the Bible.”39
Just as the new birth lies entirely in the hands of the individual, through whatever “excitements” are likely to “induce repentance,” the church is conceived primarily as a society of moral reformers. In a letter on revival, Finney issued the following, “Now the great business of the church is to reform the world — to put away every kind of sin. The church of Christ was originally organized to be a body of reformers . . . to reform individuals, communities, and governments.” If the churches will not follow, they will simply have to be left behind.40 In other words, they have to think like a movement rather than a church.
John Williamson Nevin, a Reformed contemporary of Finney, contrasted what he called “the system of the bench” (precursor to the altar call) and “the system of the catechism”:
The old Presbyterian faith, into which I was born, was based throughout on the idea of covenant family religion, church membership by God’s holy act in baptism, and following this a regular catechetical training of the young, with direct reference to their coming to the Lord’s table. In one word, all proceeded on the theory of sacramental, educational religion.41
These two systems, Nevin concluded, “involve at the bottom two different theories of religion.”
Nevin’s conclusion has been justified by subsequent history. Toward the end of his ministry, as he considered the condition of many who had experienced his revivals, Finney himself wondered if this endless craving for ever-greater experiences might lead to spiritual exhaustion.42 In fact, his worries were justified. The area where Finney’s revivals were especially dominant is now referred to by historians as the “burned-over district,” a seedbed of both disillusionment and the proliferation of esoteric sects.43
Eventually, the ideal of a measurable conversion experience not only augmented but was set over against the real but steady growth for which there could not be a standard formula of measurement. There were steps and obvious signs that you could check off to know if you were really “in.” Eventually, the routinization of conversion procedures — like those of the factories in the Industrial Revolution — could be calculated, measured, and reproduced. This is what happened in Anglo-American revivalism.
Each successive awakening or revival claimed to be radical, dispensing with the baggage of the past that weighs down mission. In relation to the history of the church, these movements are indeed radical. Yet they have been anything but countercultural, especially in the American context. The values of democracy and free enterprise — grounded in individual choice — became the gospel itself in the Second Great Awakening.
The church growth movement was as culturally (and even politically) bound as its critics have argued. And yet, one of the movement’s most vocal critics — the Emergent Movement — seems no less tethered to cultural fads. We hear once again the usual “get-with-it-or-get-left-behind” messages. We have to start over, we are told, with ordinary-ministry churches compared to pay phones: they still exist, but nobody uses them. Like most rebellions, it reflects undiscerning reactions to what it identifies, perhaps legitimately, as unthinking consumerism. It is easy simply to switch political parties. It takes little effort to determine one’s doctrinal convictions, cultural and moral sympathies, and ecclesial practices by simple antithesis. “Everything Must Change!” Away with pastors preaching sermons; let’s make it more of a dialogue with the Bible as one of the conversation partners. We share our journeys. In any case, it’s not about going to church but about being the church, not about hearing the gospel but being the gospel. Informed discernment is something that evangelicalism, across all of its “tribes,” seems to need desperately right now.
There are many today who think like Edwards but act like Finney. In Head and Heart, Catholic historian Garry Wills observes:
The camp meeting set the pattern for credentialing Evangelical ministers. They were validated by the crowd’s response. Organizational credentialing, doctrinal purity, personal education were useless here — in fact, some educated ministers had to make a pretense of ignorance. The minister was ordained from below, by the converts he made. This was an even more democratic procedure than electoral politics, where a candidate stood for office and spent some time campaigning. This was a spontaneous and instant proclamation that the Spirit accomplished. The do-it-yourself religion called for a make-it-yourself ministry.44
Wills repeats Richard Hofstadter’s conclusion that “the star system was not born in Hollywood but on the sawdust trail of the revivalists.”45
There are numerous instructions in the New Testament on church offices and qualifications, preaching, the sacraments, public prayer, and discipline. In striking contrast, there are no instructions on — or even examples of — revival. What we meet in the book of Acts is the account of the Spirit’s extraordinary work through the apostles. Throughout Luke’s account, we encounter the expression, “And the word of God spread.” That’s how God’s garden was growing. Their ministry, along with the signs and wonders certifying it, remain the indelible marks of the truth of their message for us today. Like Good Friday and Easter, Pentecost was an unrepeatable event in the history of redemption, and it is a gift that keeps on giving, through the ordinary ministry.
Many of the reasons we offer for needing revival (lethargy in evangelism and missions, lack of heartfelt experience of God’s grace, coldness in prayer, rising vice and infidelity, social evils, etc.) are problems that the ordinary ministry is supposed to address each week. Not only may the longing for revival lead us to treat this ministry as humdrum; it can subtly justify an unacceptable state of affairs in the meantime. Another question is the extent to which a longing for revival has been woven into civil religion. The antidote to a sagging moral nerve and patriotic fervor is a revival. Among other problems, this turns the gospel into a means to an end. No longer is the church’s mission to deliver Christ with all of his saving benefits to sinners; it is chiefly to act as the “soul of the nation,” to lead it onward and upward toward its exceptional destiny.
This has been the vicious cycle of evangelical revivalism ever since: a pendulum swinging between enthusiasm and disillusionment rather than steady maturity in Christ through participation in the ordinary life of the covenant community. The regular preaching of Christ from all of the Scriptures, baptism, the Supper, the prayers of confession and praise, and all of the other aspects of ordinary Christian fellowship are seen as too ordinary. Whether one agrees with that will depend largely on whether one believes that God saves sinners or we save ourselves with God’s help.
Driven to and fro with every wind of doctrine and often no doctrine at all, those reared in evangelicalism become accustomed to hype and cataclysmic events of intense spiritual experience that nevertheless wear off. When they do wear off, there is often little to keep them from trying a different form of spiritual therapy or dropping out of the religion rat race altogether.
It will come as no surprise by now that I prefer the first approach: revival as God’s extraordinary blessing on his ordinary means of grace. Looking back through church history, we can see some remarkable moments when — against all human odds — the Spirit blessed the ministry of his Word in extraordinary ways. If the Lord were to send another blessing of that sort, we should delight in his surprising grace.
The earlier revival preachers, most notably Edwards and Whitefield — and to a large extent John Wesley — still believed that revival was an extraordinary blessing on God’s ordinary means of grace. In the book of Acts we find many examples of obvious conversion experiences — frequently associated with extraordinary phenomena. Yet it is always through the ministry of the Word. Even when an angel appeared to the Roman centurion Cornelius in Acts 10, the message was to send for Peter to come and preach the gospel to him, his household, and his soldiers. Hearing the message, Cornelius and many others believed and were baptized. So even in the era of the extraordinary ministry of the apostles, the ordinary means of grace are front and center.
However, even when it is seen as a free work of God that we have no right to demand and no power to control, does focusing on revival contribute to our dissatisfaction with God’s ordinary blessing on his ordinary means? I’m inclined to think that it does — and has. We see this danger even in the first Great Awakening. It has been argued that George Whitefield was America’s first celebrity. This is not to impugn his character. Whitefield displayed remarkable humility in many ways. Up and down the Atlantic seaboard, though, his revival events divided churches. To question the innovative methods being employed was to quench the Spirit. Denunciations of various pastors as unconverted, simply because they questioned the revival, divided even colonial Calvinists.
So while we have every reason to distinguish revival as Edwards and Whitefield understood it from revivalism as it came to be identified with Finney and the Second Great Awakening, I want to press the deeper question: Is the intense longing for revival itself part of the problem, fueling the feverish expectation for The Next Big Thing? Is it not remarkable enough that Jesus Christ himself is speaking to us whenever his Word is preached each week? Is it not a miracle enough that a lush garden is blooming in the desert of this present evil age? Is it not enough of a wonder that the Spirit is still raising those who are spiritually dead to life through this preached gospel? Is water baptism an outward pledge that we make in response to a decision we made to be born again? Or is it a means of God’s miraculous grace? And is it not sufficient that those who belong to Christ are growing in the grace and knowledge of his Word, strengthened in their faith by the regular administration of the Supper, common fellowship in doctrine, prayer, and praise, guided by elders and served by deacons? Doesn’t the longing for revival tend to create the impression that between revivals you have lulls where the Spirit is not active at least in the same power or degree of power through these means Christ appointed?
From a New Testament perspective, what happens every day in churches across America and around the world is what really matters in terms of repentance and faith. The problem is that many of the churches longing for revival to fix our spiritual ills as a nation are unwitting carriers of secularization to the people in the pews each week. It is not just this revival or that revival, in my view, but the longing for revival itself that works against the patient, difficult, often tedious, and yet marvelously effective means that God has ordained for expanding his kingdom. Pragmatism becomes the norm. The past and present are to be forgotten. God is doing something completely new among us that cannot be contained in the old jars. It is this way of thinking that dislodges us from faithful preaching, administration of the sacraments, and mutual accountability for life and doctrine in the communion of saints.
Conversion and Covenantal Nurture
If our Christian life is grounded in a radical experience, we will keep looking for repeat performances. Not slow growth in the same direction, but radical spikes in the graph. This keeps us always on the prowl for The Next Big Thing.
Conversion and covenantal nurture go hand-in-hand in Scripture. Evangelism is not something reserved for unbelievers we invite to a special service. It’s the weekly mission to the saved and the lost alike. There is no opposition between personal faith in Christ and the ministry of the church, “getting saved” and “joining a church.” Peter declared in his Pentecost sermon, “The promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:39). Cut to the quick by Peter’s sermon, many believed and were baptized.
We are also told that converts brought their whole household under the covenant promises through baptism (Acts 16:14 – 15, 31; 1 Cor 1:16). The children of believers are holy, set apart by God’s promise (1 Cor 7:14), although some will reject their birthright (Heb 12:16; cf. 6:1 – 9). There is, therefore, a birthright. Warnings against apostasy in the new covenant are grounded in the promises and threats that are found throughout the history of the one covenant of grace. The main argument is simple: those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s spiritual offspring, heirs of the covenant promise (Rom 4:16 – 17; Gal 3:6 – 9, 14, 28; 4:30). The children of believers were heirs and therefore received God’s sign and seal of his promise. This sacrament was circumcision in the old covenant, given to males only, and is baptism in the new covenant, received by males and females.
Responding to God’s promise, parents — and indeed the whole church — vow to raise these children in the covenant. This shapes the entire outlook of the church in its ministry. There is the expectation that their children will come to profess faith publicly before the elders, and this will be ratified by their being welcomed to the Lord’s Table.
There is also the other half of Peter’s statement: “The promise is you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” The church cannot be a secret society, closed in on itself. We cannot choose between a maintenance ministry and a missional ministry. Rather, the mission of the church is to announce and apply the promise to those within and those outside. We don’t find in Acts two different ministries: one for adult conversions and another for “you and your children.” Evangelization is for everyone, all the time, not just for special services. Yet evangelism requires preaching, baptism, and instruction in everything Christ taught and commanded (see Matt 28:18 – 20). This does not happen through extraordinary ministries but through the church’s ordinary ministry.
While acknowledging surprising conversions (Luther’s, for example), the Reformers saw conversion as a lifelong process of growing and deepening repentance and faith in Christ. This was not enough for the radical Protestants, though. A deeper question concerns our understanding of conversion. If you believe that genuine conversion is always a definable, radical, even datable moment, you will be inclined to look for obvious moments of revival that were radical breakthroughs on a wider scale. However, if you believe that the Spirit’s work in conversion is mysterious and varies in its outward evidences from person to person, through the same ordinary ministry, you will be less likely to have lists of discernible experiences and evidences to which each must conform. You will rejoice with those who experience an obvious moment of conversion and also with those who come gradually to recognize that they belong to Christ. Furthermore, repentance and faith are not a one-time experience, but are part of a lifelong process that has ups and downs along the way. The most important thing to keep our eye on is not religious experience itself, but the faithful ministry of God’s means of grace.
How Was Church Today?
Recall again Joe Queenan’s clever description of Boomer aversion toward the ordinary.46 The same is true of church. “How was church today?” In most times and places of the church, this would have been an unlikely question. In fact, the hearer might have been confused. Why? Because it’s like asking how the meals at home have been this week or asking a farmer how the crops did this week. “How was the sermon?” “Was it a good service?” Same blank stare from the ancestors. In those days, churches didn’t have to be rockin’ it, nobody expected the preacher to hit it out of the park, and the service was, well, a service.
Now, that doesn’t mean that what happens at church through these ordinary means in ordinary services of ordinary churches on ordinary weeks is itself ordinary. What happens is quite extraordinary indeed. First and foremost, God shows up. He judges and justifies, draws sinners and gathers his sheep to his Son by his Word and Spirit. He unites them to Christ, bathes them and feeds them, teaches and tends them along their pilgrim way. He expands his empire even as he deepens it. It is through this divinely ordained event that “the powers of the age to come” penetrate into the darkest crevices of this passing evil age (Heb 6:3 – 6).
So one way people might have responded in times past, at least in churches of the Reformation, would have been something like these expressions: “Well, it was one more nail in the coffin of the old Adam” or “God absolved me” or maybe something as simple as, “It’s been good to understand the Gospel of John a little better over these past few months.”
Once more, the marriage analogy is apt. Wrestling daily with whether they want to remain married to each other, many couples seeking counseling expect a breakthrough, preferably in the first session. Marital problems are treated like medical problems. “Make them go away.” We can benefit from a good marriage conference, but then we return home and find ourselves back in the everydayness of actual marriage. It is there, in the daily grind, that we have to die to ourselves, loving and serving our closest neighbor.
A person may not share any responsibility for arthritis or kidney stones, and it is possible that the doctor can make it go away. However, marriage isn’t like that. As in all relationships, we are both sinners and sinned against, perpetrators and victims — simultaneously. Furthermore, the expectation of “breakthroughs” reflects an impatience with — perhaps even misunderstanding of — marriage itself. If breakthroughs come at all, they arrive usually unbidden. Breakthroughs are what happen when you’re expecting something else. When I hear — really hear — my wife say something for the first time that she has said over and over. When a wife does something unexpected for her husband and as a result they both end up taking fresh delight in each other. In other words, even breakthroughs usually come through ordinary acts.
These aren’t breakthroughs that you go looking for; they’re just things that happen in a marriage because you have two people being guided by God’s good providence in spite of their sin. Now, add more sinners to the mix — first your own children. Then even more sinners — your local church. It is going to be tough, because, like us, these other people are still battling with selfishness and self-righteousness. But we’re battling together. Nothing is more sanctifying than another person in our life. They are good at holding up mirrors, when we had quite different images of ourselves.
With the body of Christ, we only multiply the number of sinners involved. Yes, we are forgiven, justified, adopted. We are regenerated and are being conformed to the image of Christ. God’s Word promises this and he ratifies it to each of us in baptism and Communion. Yet it’s difficult to preserve the bond of unity when we are not only sinners but are so different in our backgrounds and interests. The Big Event — a conference, retreat, or concert — can sweep us off our feet. But the danger is that when we come back to our local church, we’re disappointed. No more fireworks. It seems so ordinary.
The alternative to looking for breakthroughs is not passivity. In fact, it is relying on breakthroughs that makes us passive. We keep waiting for something to happen to us. We want the doctor to fix us and the counselor to fix our marriage and the pastor to fix any number of felt needs. But it is the ordinary disciplines and not the extraordinary breakthroughs that make a marriage. It is much easier to think — and even to say to our spouse, “Hey, let’s go on an out-of-the-park vacation together, alone.” That’s where we’ll have our breakthrough, right? So for the time being at least, we’re off the hook. Until then, we can still be jerks to each other, spend the extra hour or two at the office, forget to ask how the doctor’s visit went, and resent each other for “not meeting my needs.” See how the search for the extraordinary actually undermines excellence — that which is true, good, and beautiful? How the passion for perpetual breakthroughs actually makes us passive?
The same logic works for our life in the body of Christ. The summer camp, revival, new spiritual workout plan, or cultural-transformation strategy is equivalent to the “breakthrough” that short-term investors, couples, and Christians are looking for, but that actually keep them from becoming healthy, mature, and stable.
In the circles with which I’m most familiar, it isn’t the summer camp or revival, but the parachurch ministry or conference that makes everyday faithfulness in a local church seem like a trip to the dentist. I encounter regularly professing Christians who lament their church situation, but did not rank “a solid church” at the top of their list when considering their move to a new city. They may attend the right conferences and read the right books, but they are a thorn in the side of their pastor and fellow members. Or perhaps they do not set aside the Lord’s Day at all and fill the day with something other than the means of grace and the fellowship of the saints. But they blame the church for its failure to feed them.
Jesus Christ officially instituted the means of grace in clear and unmistakable terms: preaching the gospel, baptizing, and discipline — that is, teaching people to observe everything he commanded (Matt 28:19 – 20). In other words, it is what the Reformed confessions define as the “three marks of the church”: no more, no fewer. There is no bait-and-switch. You don’t start with “what people want” in order to get them to “what they need.” The same means of grace that bring them in keep them in. We are passive recipients of Christ with all of his benefits, but this makes us active in everyday ways as we live with and love others.
Exercise
1. How does the church’s attraction to The Next Big Thing reflect broader cultural influences?
2. Evangelicals are often suspicious of tradition, but is evangelicalism a tradition too? If so, in what ways — particularly, in ways that encourage new waves of extraordinary excitement?
3. Talk about revival. What are some of the different approaches to revival in our Anglo-American history? Are there any downsides to focusing on revival?
4. What would you say if someone asked you how church was this week? Reflect on your answers.