The Church's One Foundation
There are many reasons to be nervous and anxious about the future of the church if you are a modern-day Christian in North America or Europe. Polarization, narratives of institutional decline, ongoing schisms, falling birth rates, epically public moral failures - all of these point towards a crumbling of the life of power that many Christians have known in some capacity during the last 1500 years. Insofar as we have any love for the institutional church, the current erosion of what we’ve constructed can understandably lead to nervousness and anxiety. Are our churches crumbling because we are unfaithful? What more do we need to do? What will happen if we don’t? These are questions worth posing, but we must ask them remembering that the foundation of the church is not washing away, even if some of its ornamented scaffolding is.
In times of deep uncertainty like these, the Spirit wants to remind us that the resurrected Jesus bears on his person the marks of our disunity, uncertainty, and confusion. No amount of human disarray is a match for God’s faithfulness. The Spirit is calling church members away from the restlessness of worrying about our waning institutional vibrancy and towards the faithful rest made possible by Jesus, our true foundation. We can rest assured.
As Mako Fujimura puts it in Art + Faith: A Theology of Making, the church, like all of creation, lives inside the grace of God. God does not need us, but God made us. God has freely given us life, and freely invites us to participate in the life-giving work of the church. Therefore, in order to survive, we need Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need us. This one-way dependence on God is an important truth during these times of unrest, because the struggles our institutions are going through can tempt us to adopt the position of savior and overextend ourselves. (I’m preaching to myself here!)
But because Jesus is the foundation, we can participate in the work freely trusting in God, thankful that we have any role to play in the first place. Keeping Jesus as the foundation grounds us in the urgent work of the ministry, yet can also help stave off the restlessness of anxiety and over-functioning that leads to widespread burnout among the saints. As we journey towards the cross this Lenten season, we’re reminded that our faithfulness doesn’t guarantee institutional longevity. However, it does make us available to the rich reward of intimacy with God, the kind exhibited by the women bearing witness at Christ’s birth, crucifixion and the resurrection.
This is the hope and conviction from which I played “The Church’s One Foundation” on Rest Assured. S. J. Stone penned these beautiful lyrics about what the church is meant to be in the world: “[the church] is his new creation, by water and Word.” My hope is that you hear in this song an invitation to move into the restfulness of the church’s founder. We ought love and nurture the church not out of anxiety for self-preservation, but out of the free gift of grace that God gave us in life itself.
May this music and devotional help you celebrate the fact our foundation is as sturdy as ever. We serve a mighty good God!
What restlessness do you see coming from failures in the church? Does that turn you away from the church? How can you (re)engage the church again through the lens of holding onto Jesus?
Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash