The Impure Church (ii)

FPC, Lowville, NY

This is the second posting in a series working on what it means to be a church, based on eight criteria the Mars Hill Church uses to define its branch congregations as churches.  The series began with the previous posting (here).

The first criterion used on the Mars Hill list of criteria is, "The church is made up of regenerated believers in Jesus."

This criterion, first, describes the ideal church rather than a real one.  By "regenerated believers," we can take it the church is supposed to be made up of individuals who have gone through a conversion experience that has changed their lives fundamentally.  They are "born again."  This strongly suggests that churches are to be composed only of those who are "true" Christians.  And that is a problem.  In the real world, churches are a mixture of people consistently serious in their faith, people who are sometimes serious, people seldom serious, and people who belong to the church for other reasons—frequently because other members of the family go to the church.  No church is composed entirely of "regenerated believers in Jesus."

Since at least the time of Tertullian, an early church father who lived in the second century, the church has repeatedly struggled with the issue of its purity.  It was the issue that dominated the Protestant Reformation and has contributed to the frequent subsequent splits among Protestants resulting in today's horde of denominations.  The question of true faith and right belief lies at the heart of the great divide between ecumenical and evangelical churches.  These issues have repeatedly shaken the foundations of the Presbyterian Church (USA) as hundreds of churches and tens of thousands of members have abandoned the denomination especially over the question of homosexuality.

Among Protestants, at least, the purity of the church is of much greater concern, clearly, than is the unity of the church.  The problem is, of course, that a pure church is an impossible dream.  And, ironically, the pursuit of the dream does more harm than good because it fosters intolerance and judgmental attitudes, which are in spirit quite unlike Christ.  It tends to externalize our struggle with evil by encouraging us to see the speck in the eye of the other and miss the log in our own eye.  In its arrogance, the demand for a pure church made up only of "regenerated believers" actually offends others, drives them away from Christ.  And, in all of this, the desire for a pure church divides Christians one against another, weakening the church and its ability to serve in Christ's name.

The church's task is not to be pure but rather to be as effective as it can in service to Christ and neighbor, while confessing its own limitations and failures.  In the real world and facing our real human limitations, the church is not an organization of the regenerated but of the committed.  Our task is not to discover purity but humility.  Humility of spirit is a real, invaluable possibility.  Purity is a chimera.