The Doctrine of the Church

Scripture: Revelation 3.14-22; Matthew 16.13-19; 1 Peter 2.4-10


I had to drive down 36 to Everett and over the mountain to McConnellsburg last weekend for a wedding rehearsal. It was a rehearsal for the wedding of a girl from my first parish. I did it out of courtesy and genuine pleasure to help the family out. But the way home from the rehearsal was an hour and half drive that was dark and very foggy. And when the fog lifted it started pouring rain in sheets. At about that time I said to myself, “What am I doing here? Is this really worth the risk?”

Think about the risk you took to get here. Some of you drove some distance and some of you probably drove faster than you should to get here on time. You trusted your lives not just to the driver but to other drivers around you, total strangers. It has been said that we trust strangers more to get to church than we trust the Holy Spirit once we arrive.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Think of images or metaphors that come to mind when you say church. “Building” often comes to mind – we say we’re going to church. We think of the building, a place. And the main part of the building is called the “sanctuary.” Sanctuary is an image that has for a long time meant safety, particularly safety from the outside world; safety from an alien or hostile culture. Bad guys out there, good guys in here. But it was not always this way. And I would suggest that we need to reclaim a new meaning for sanctuary – “a safe place to take risks for the kingdom of God.”

Some years ago I was leading a church in a discussion about a new step in ministry. The church had experienced some growth and I believed needed to take this next step to continue to be faithful to God’s mission. Of course, there was some risk involved and no guarantees that we would be successful. I framed it with the words, “We need to risk this for God.” One woman, a very good woman and a friend, said to me, “risk, that doesn’t sound like faith to me.” It doesn’t because for most of us, faith has meant playing it safe.

Listen to what Jesus has to say to the church of Laodicea in Rev. 3. “I know what you have done, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other!” What is Jesus saying? Stop being mediocre and apathetic. Stop playing it safe. Get passionate about something for God’s sake! As it is, “you make me want to throw up.”

What is the church? The church is not a building of course, but people, engaged in a life-saving mission. In many ways the culture is hostile, but the people we want to reach are drowning in that culture. Those people are not enemies, but our friends. We are their life-saving station and lifeboat. The motto of the Coastguard should be our motto, “We have to go out, but we don’t have to come back.” See, the church is the only organization in the world that exists for those not yet part of it. And so we have to rightly understand who we are and what is our mission. The great mission statement of Jesus is that we go and make disciples in cultures. Our job is not to transform or replace cultures, but transform people in cultures. Our job is to get a hearing for the greatest story ever told, a story that is meant for all human beings, everywhere, always. Our job is to tell the truth in love.
Phillip Yancey tells the story of an election in the Ukraine. The government had opened up free elections thinking there was no way they couldn’t win. But as the ballots were being counted it soon became clear that the incumbents were going to be thrown out of power by Yushenko, the reform candidate. So what did the government do? They rigged the election. They ignored the ballot count and just had the television stations and newspapers announce that the incumbent party had won. It would have worked except that on of the tv stations there was an interpreter for the deaf, who instead of doing what she was told, on camera kept signing, “They lie. Yushenko won.” And the course of the country was changed.

The church is called to tell the truth to people who have been fed lies. We are not called to successful results, just faithful witness. It means using whatever is at our disposal to get that witness out, the story told. Len Sweet tells about visiting a church that used gourmet coffee as part of their ministry to people. He noticed that there were coffee stains all over the carpet. The pastor told him, “We believe the carpet exists for the people, not the people for the carpet.” Sweet said it was the first carpet he met that was in ministry. The church is not the carpet or the building, but the people engaged in ministry to the world.

So we don’t have to concern ourselves with the small stuff. We should not get distracted by stains on the carpet or whether so and so looks or acts like we do. See, the church is not a subculture to which we must conform. Someone told me about a coworker of theirs who suggested if you weren’t a member of their church then you weren’t saved. The church doesn’t save anybody, and certainly the peculiar styles and ways in that particular church does not. The church is the bearer of the Good News of Salvation in Jesus Christ. In that sense, there is no salvation outside the Church, (Big C) because the church carries the message.

The church is the spiritual house of God’s presence. We remind the world of an unseen, spiritual reality. See, the fundamental heresy of our time is that the most powerful forces and realities are physical and material, that the trees move the wind. We remind people that it is the wind that moves the trees and the trees acknowledge the wind’s supremacy – like Isaiah says, “the trees of the field clap their hands” in obeisance to the invisible power. What are we, the church? We are masters of the wind, sailors of the spirit, windsurfers.

We could spend days talking about what’s wrong with the church. And people do. We must acknowledge our weaknesses and our sins, but we must never forget our identity and our power and our potential. As St. Augustine said, “The church is a whore and she is my mother.” And for reasons I don’t fully understand but I fully know, Jesus loves the church. “He loves the church,” Don Miller writes, “With the same strength of character He displays in His love for me. Sometimes it is difficult to know which is the greater miracle.”