The Church as Irrelevant Social Club

I think the current model of the church is unsustainable, just like the current model for the family is unsustainable. I think that if churches try to hold fast to the North American industrial-era (“Modern”) model they will experience more and more the warning of MLK that they will be (already have been?) reduced to irrelevant social clubs. King talked about restoring the prophetic vision of the church in terms of the need for the church to stand for social justice, which it must, but it needs also to recapture the sense of community that made those first-century churches so attractive and led to such explosive growth in the beginning.

When I refer to sense of community here, I refer to what we would understand as the “sentimentalized” family. It’s not just a room full of individuals gathering to be mildly entertained once a week. It is a real flesh and blood body just like Paul describes in 1 Cor. 12, a real living organism in which each member plays a vital role of caring for all of the other members and as a whole, with Christ at the head, continuing Christ’s work of restoration.

The place where I see the greatest movement in this direction is in the so-called “emergent” churches. Unfortunately, I have seen many of the advocates of this more community-oriented approach to Christian community align themselves with social and political positions that I believe cannot be sustained biblically (like so-called “gay” marriage, for example). It must be possible to imagine a Christian community that rejects the wrong-headed alignment of the church with conservative politics without aligning with opposite sentiments. Our goal here is kingdom politics.

I really enjoyed reading Clapp’s take on the whole issue of family. I think that honestly facing the historical, social, and cultural reality of what we think of as the “traditional” family does make possible a re-evaluation of the whole community. In the larger picture, Clapp confirms in one aspect what I see as the failure of the “Modern” meta-narrative. It is only when we recognize that it is dead, and should be dead, that we can imagine a better meta-narrative, one that we do not have to construct, but that Jesus has already constructed for us.

From a review of Clapp, Rodney. Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional & Modern Options. Downers Grove, Ill., USA.: IVP Books, 1993.