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I began to wonder recently: What if we simply removed about 1800 years of Church History, which would put us about 167 years after the death of Christ, and about 170ish years before the church began to become the centralized religion of the Roman Empire? What if we erased all that we know about what humans have done to how Christians convene and act and live their lives? How would we know how to act and what to do?
Of course, we’d look at Christ wouldn’t we? We’d look to the Bible, to The Acts of the Apostles found in the Book of Acts, to the Gospels, and we’d hopefully consider these things to be the sort of blue print on which we build our actions, expectations, and understandings of the Christian lives. However, I suspect if we did this our model of doing “church” might come out radically different from what it is right now.
You see, what has happened in Church History is that the Church began by doing things the way the apostles set things up as they learned it from Christ. Then those taught by the apostles set up their “churches” the way the apostles taught them to, and so on and so on; but at some point we began to set things up according to the way “we’ve always done it”–that dreaded, Godless phrase that focuses more on a religion that starts with man than a theology that starts with God. I cannot help but wonder if we have diverged from the path and built a temple on a foundation of sand for a thousand years that is now beginning to show its weakness as the newest waves of history batter it?
Let me state my point clearly. What I am saying is that if we look to Christ and the actions of the Apostles, they did things differently than we do! We, in the established and centrally located Church, draw people out of their homes, often times out of their immediate communities and vicinities to come to our churches and to our worship services; and then we beg them to become a community together, to establish themselves as a community over the common bond of a worship service that they were attracted to because it was likely more entertaining than most and supplied them with the strength to withstand the unbelievable boredom and total lack of application and meaning that many people find themselves mired in on Sunday mornings between 8 am and 12 pm. We create a service, a worship service, in hopes that it would instigate community to be formed. We create “worshippers” hoping that it would create community and disciples of Christ. However, Christ did it quite differently, did He not? He didn’t invite the disciples to a worship service or to a church service, though they did go to “church” as we would call it. Still, the number of stories of Christ talking in a “church-like” atmosphere is quite low compared to the number of stories where the disciples were just living life with Christ. Christ did not create church in hopes of creating community, he did not create “worshippers” in hopes of creating disciples. Christ created disciples in hows of creating worshippers, he created a community in hopes to create a church! We are wrong, Christ was right.
The prodigal son didn’t return because of a philosophical and theological argument. No one spoke truth to Him about the truth of his Father’s house being the heart’s true home–after all, arguments only eliminate lies…experience is what reinforces truth. And the Prodigal did not return home because that was the way he had always done it–bleh, that phrase again. No, the Prodigal returned home because in a moment he remembered all that had transacted in the Father’s home and his heart remembered that it was where it belonged. It was the deeply transformational and experiential knowing that drew the boy back to the loving arms of His father, and the father did not disappoint did he? No, he didn’t. The Son returned home to find that what his heart yearned for was neither a lie or a mirage, it was truth, a very legitimate reality–one that his heart begged to return to from the wasteland of warmth and true love that it found itself immersed in out in the foreign land.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Church may have been wrong for a thousand plus years, and do not think I do not understand the unbelievable audacity that one must have to insinuate such a thing. It’s not like I’m part of some denomination or sect of Christianity that thinks that Church History holds no weight in arguments–not that other denominations are dumb or anything, I’m just arguing that I don’t flippantly question church tradition without good reason. After all: Scripture + tradition + reason + experience. I just wonder if the flipping of the flow of “church making,” i.e. beginning with community formation and small groups and accountability, then moving into large scale corporate worship would create the warmth of the Father’s house that the Prodigal was so eager to return to. I wonder if we built corporate worship on the foundation of intimate community, and then through in the depths of church history’s more powerful creeds and rites if it would create a more spiritually healthy congregations that are a mile deep and perhaps even a mile wide instead of a mile wide and an inch deep?
If the Trinity is the perfect form of community, if God was a community before He was the God of humanity, doesn’t that mean that maybe we ought to give a bit more thought to community in the church instead of rock and roll church services that, in some ways, exalt entertainment over and above the worship of God? As the incredible Indian preacher Ravi Zacharias once said in a sermon, “In community we are unified -which does not necessarily mean uniform- and worship is difficult if not impossible without unity.”

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