Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Survival, Growth, and the Gospel


One of the things that concerns me most about the life of the Church right now is its anxious concern for survival.  That almost always means institutional survival, by the way.  For one thing, I don’t think you could kill the institutional church if you tried.  The truth is that it’s just too strong and its resources too vast.  You can, though, subvert its reason for being.  You can lead it astray.  You can make it an instrument of something far removed from the Gospel of Love.  All those have been done many times over the 2,000 years of its life. 

But you can’t kill it.  To tell you the truth, I’m not always sure that’s completely good news.  And here’s why.

Survival is not a value of the Gospel.  Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Mt. 16:25)  Salvation can only be had by those who can die.  Life can only be had at the risk of losing it.  The way of life is the way of the cross, and that leaves no room for survival.  This is slightly off the point, but there is an ancient heresy called Docetism, which would say that Jesus, because he was not truly human, could not have died on the cross.  If so, that would mean there is no hope for salvation.  Jesus lives, but Jesus lives precisely because Jesus did not survive.  And that’s how we live, too, at least truly live, as individuals, as a community, and one hopes, as an institution.

We spend a lot of time as the Church these days anxiously worrying about our survival.  Our numbers are dropping.  Our collections are shrinking.  We don’t have the influence we once did.  We are losing our place of power, privilege, and prestige.  And so we come up with a lot of plans to grow, to get more people in the pews, and to increase giving.  We’re trying to hang on, to survive. 

Every plan or strategy to grow born out of our survival anxiety, every single one, is doomed to failure because it cannot be blessed by God.  It may succeed for a little while, but if it does, it will be one of those moments, once again, where the church has lost its way. 

The Church can only be itself when it risks its life to pick up its cross, which is a way of saying when it carries out the ministry of Jesus, is it not?  The church can only be itself when it risks its life to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, cure the sick, restore sight to the blind, and free the oppressed.  Those may not, we must admit, be prudent growth strategies, especially when the culture around us is quite invested in keeping the poor poor (as are our own institutional interests).  They are, though, a very sound plan to be who we are, baptized, as we have been, into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

The Church in its first four centuries grew, not dramatically as we sometimes like to imagine, but slowly, steadily and consistently.  It grew, I suspect, because it was true to itself, to what Christ had made it to be, not because it had a strategy but because it lived the Gospel.  It grew, I suspect, because it cared not for its own survival, which strangely enough, is inherently attractive.  The second century Christian apologist Tertullian said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”  I think it is true on many levels.  The pre-Constantinian Church had a plan for life, not survival.  It had a commitment to faith, not growth.  It isn’t that growth is a bad thing.  It is the inevitable fruit of the Church’s life.  But it is endangered by the Church’s survival. 

The post-Constantinian Church grew, too, by the way, maybe even more dramatically.  But it grew because it allied itself to power and forced not a few conversions at the point of the sword and became attractive as a way to partner with the culture rather than as a witness to the resurrection to it.  It shifted its focus from the reign of God’s imminent arrival to something distant and other worldly and far less threatening to its own survival.  It was, one must admit, an effective growth strategy. 

But Jesus asked, “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?  Or what will they give in return for their life?” (v. 26)  It’s a good question.  And it worries me about what this means for an institution that cannot be killed.  We’ve got to at least be willing for it to die in order for it to have any chance at life at all. 

Now is the time to ask ourselves if the fundamental reason we are in decline is that paradoxically because we have given up our willingness to die, without which there can be no life at all.  And if that’s the case, we can only hope our desire to survive will kill us.

Peace,

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