Grace and Truth

I have been wrestling with the above question for the several months. The question is not sociological. I know well that the congregation belongs to its members and not to its pastor. Pastors come and go, but congregations remain.

That last sentence reveals a bias, I know. With all the data, it may seem unreasonable to say “congregations remain.” We are graying, aging, declining in many ways. At conference meetings one detects the anxiety just below the surface, an anxiety born of facts that point to our pending demise as a people. That same anxiety is felt in the larger denomination, as together we try to figure out how to preserve and even restore the church. Preserve it for the next generation and restore it to something like its former dignity and grandeur.

But whose church is it anyway? Here I’m asking the question theologically. If all we consider are the facts, if all we read is the data, we can easily succumb to the notion that the church is dying or at least on the road to death. And so we scramble to come up with some new idea of how to make the church more accessible or user-friendly, more missional or in some other way more attractive to those outside. These are all noble pursuits; they are all aspects of our calling to live out the Great Commission. This is what we were created to be and do as church.

But underneath it all is this anxiety, this fear that says we’d better hurry up and grow or else. What’s missing from so many of our conversations, strategy sessions and frettings about the state of the church is a clear declaration of the role of the Holy Spirit in the preservation and growth of the church and its mission. Or perhaps it is our lack of believing what we declare to be true. We Mennonites look at the church and the world and think it is somehow up to us to fix the one and save the other. We often behave as if we believe the church will die unless we come up with some brilliant marketing scheme or missional strategy.

But whose church is it anyway? Isn’t Jesus Christ the Lord of the church? And didn’t he give us the Spirit to ensure the church would thrive and serve God’s purposes in the world? Do we believe that the church belongs to Jesus Christ and that the Spirit is still alive and well and working within and among us and in our world and that the body of Christ will endure and continue to be salt and light to the world until Christ returns?

If so, then perhaps we can engage in a little reorientation. Rather than looking at the church and seeing only gray hair and wrinkled faces, maybe we need to look a little deeper and see the light of Christ and the hand of the Spirit. Rather than assuming the church is ours to save and the world ours to gain, perhaps we ought to throw up our hands and call upon the Lord of the church to have his way with us, even if that means smaller gatherings and slimmer offerings. Maybe we need to admit that the church does not belong to us, that we couldn’t save it if we tried and that our addiction to the facts too often borders on the unfaithful.

This is not a call to avoid our genuine missional calling. Neither is it whistling past the graveyard.

It is an invitation to wrestle with our theology of the church. What exactly is the Spirit up to among us graying, wrinkled and worried Mennonites? Let’s try to discern that and then give thanks before we get to work.

Ron Adams is pastor at East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, Pa.