INTRODUCTION TO A WORK IN PROGRESS
The title of this multi-part series on the church reminds me of a Greek saying “Panta Rhei, Oude Menei” which translates as “Everything flows, Nothing Remains the Same.”
My interest in the church goes back many decades. Whenever I buy a book, I always write the date of purchase and the city where I bought it on the inside cover. For instance, Helmut Thielicke’s “The trouble with the Church, a Call for Renewal” was bought in 1965, the year I became an elder in the Christian Reformed Church in St. Catharines, Ontario. Since then I have acquired dozens more dealing with the church.
Now, without warning, something in me has urged me to clarify my own thinking on this topic, so my first action was to pull from my library some 25 books related to church and religion.
Why do I feel compelled to write now? People of the Reformation are apt to quote a Latin phrase “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda – The Reformed Church, Always in the process of Reforming. I believe this to be true. However, when I look around me and cast a glance back into history, then it seems to me that in reality the slogan is “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Eadem – The Reformed Church, Always the Same. In essence nothing major has occurred for more than 1500 years in the Roman Catholic Church and almost 500 years in the Protestant part. The organized church is now 2000 years old. From all indications not much has changed in those two millennia, yet we have seen enormous evolutions in living habits, business practices, education, science, medicine, statecraft, but somehow the structure of the church has seen little development. Do New Times call for a different sort of church? That’s what I want to explore in these musings about the church.
I believe that we have come to a crucial moment in history: we have entered ‘The Last Days”. Of course that is nothing new for those who know the Bible: the entire New Testament has been written with The Last Days in mind. If that is true – and I believe it is – should the church not be in the forefront to prepare people? A real call to repentance, such as John the Baptizer did when he shouted: “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand?”
Yes, I sense it’s for real. I will elaborate on this more extensively in the following segment.
To be able to concentrate on this I have suspended my weekly newspaper column on World Affairs, so this range of bites, of some 1000 words, will not appear in print but be strictly for web consumption. How these whispered words will wing their way into the whole wide world, only the Lord knows. I will simply float them on my blog and pray that somehow they will reach those who wait expectantly for His return.
I know that everything still looks quite normal. That too is a sign of The Last Days: after all the Lord Himself has said that His return will be ‘Like a Thief in the Night’. Who knows we have become so immune to what’s going on around us that we may not have noticed the magic manifestations of the “number of the Beast: 666.” Climate Change, a topic of mostly verbal inaction, has not yet reached our doorsteps; Peak Oil, as sure to come as night follows day, has not yet affected us; a possible Pandemic is still gestating somewhere. But we are already vulnerable where it hurts: in our wallets. The gods of finance have already fallen on their faces.
Yet life goes on as if nothing is different out there: people marry or start living together; children are born; couples split; more men and women grow old; in other words: life rolls on in the regular rhythm of birth, life and death, and, when I observe the church, it too behaves as if nothing has changed or even will ever change.
That too makes sense, because we seldom question our most reliable and well-established entities. The church has always been there. Why submit it to a thorough analysis? But we have to because we live in New Times. Fact is that the rulers of this world are desperately trying the right the economic ship, which is heeling unhealthily and chances are more than even that it will keel over, imperiling our way of life built on fictitious money. This situation is so critical that many start to question the role of Capitalism and Globalization, the two major engines of the current economy.
Since we already are breathing in the air of doubt about the very foundations of our financial state, the time is opportune also to ponder the current make-up of the church, where it has come from, where it now is, and whether the current model still is effective in the New Times.
So why me? Am I really qualified to do this? Of course nobody has asked me to engage in this. Here’s why I undertake this enterprise. I have always been intimately involved in the church. When we moved to Tweed in 1975, I soon became an elder again, this time in the local Presbyterian Church, served twice as moderator of the Kingston Presbytery (the first lay person to occupy that office) – the equivalent of Classis in the Christian Reformed Church – obtaining a picture of the spiritual part of the church, and later was the chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Church, observing how the church deals with money matters.
I am an active person by nature: want to be involved, so I chaired (Christian) school boards, coordinated the start of Quinte Christian High School, the first president of the Tweed Area Community Care Incorporated, and wrote weekly columns for decades. But now I believe the time has come to look critically at the only other institution to which I have pledged my troth.
I aim to develop my theme of ‘The Church in Flux” by looking critically at the church, that human institution, among which, I know, most members of the Church with a capital C can be found, that mysterious body, the true Church, not recognized by its spires or a published membership list.