Restoration: The Beauty of the Church

Works of art, like all things, are subject to decay and deterioration. Amazing techniques have been developed to bring faded, cracked, or even partly missing paintings back to their original condition. Problems that develop over time in artistic creations must be reversed and repaired to restore a painting to the condition it was in when it first came from the artist’s hand. 

The church is not unlike a work of art. Over the two millennia since its inception, the church has developed all sorts of maladies that are the ecclesiastical counterparts of cracking, fading, or even partial destruction. These conditions must be reversed and repaired so that the church can be restored to the beauty God intended for His work of art, His church. 

The problems that fade the glory of the church often change with the times. Some problems have plagued the church throughout its existence, while other problems are unique to certain ages. Whatever the case, those interested in church restoration must begin their work by identifying conditions in the church in their own time that require repair. Sometimes these problems are new, but often we can learn from those who struggled with similar problems in the past. 

What kinds of flaws have shown up in the twenty-first-century church? What follows is not meant to be exhaustive, of course. These are just some things, not all equal weight perhaps, that have stood the modern church in need of repair. 

Soaking Up Syncretism 

The early church went against the grain of that culture by rejecting syncretism. This often earned Christians the wrath of their culture. The Roman Empire had conquered societies that held to all sorts of religions. The Roman approach to reconciling these various religions was to think of all the gods as legitimate and compatible with one another. 

The church rejected “gods” in favor of “the Maker of Heaven and Earth.” The church of the twenty-first century is flirting with syncretism. You could see a glimpse of this at the National Cathedral Service on the Friday following September 11, 2001. Christian leaders stood beside Islamic clerics and Jewish rabbis to pray to God in a manner that sometimes suggested that “Allah” might just be another name for Jehovah. 

The teaching of Christianity that is most off-putting to many people today is its exclusivism. People are often attracted to many points of the teaching of Jesus. Forgiveness is considered a good, even mentally healthy, idea today. Compassion is much admired, but once people hear Jesus say, “No one comes to the Father except through Me,” there is a tendency among the people of our age to recoil in horror. If the way of Christ is the only way to God, then all the other proposals since His time have been false. 

This is something the twenty-first century spirit cannot abide. While this attitude is not unexpected outside the church, it finds an unfortunate counterpart in debates about truth within the church today. The “in opinion, liberty” aspect of the restoration plea seems to have swallowed up almost everything. Humility is a wonderful attitude, but when humility is taken to the limit, and then perhaps twisted a little, it leaves no room for the teaching of sound doctrine. 

Once everything has become merely a matter of opinion, any knowledge of the truth has been displaced by perpetual uncertainty. While this fits very nicely with the spirit of our age, it makes the church as envisioned in the New Testament impossible to implement. Certain, immutable truths form the boundaries of God’s people. Take away these boundaries, and the church is quickly absorbed back into the culture. Is that not a fairly good—and disturbing—description of what we see happening to much of the church today? 

Loaded Leadership 

One of the first known degenerations from the Apostolic order in the early church was the change to rule by a college of elders/bishops. Not all that long after the time of the Apostles, one bishop began to rule in each city, assisted by a collection of elders. The artificial separation of these two functions was an item of decay from the Apostolic picture of the church. The rule of one man in the church of each city was a further crack in that picture. Today, many congregations have the functional equivalent of “the bishop” disguised under the name preacher, minister, or pastor. 

Some proposals for church expansion seem to flirt with danger here. For example, consider the “multi-site” church model. While there might be nothing wrong with it per se, it would be very easy for the minister of a growing church to start “branching out” with locations around a city or area. Soon, he could be “the archbishop” of his own mini-denomination. 

Why is the one-man rule approach so popular? Often, it is just because it appears to “work” well, which brings up the next point. 

Pragmatism 

How should we decide what the church ought to do? Is “it works” enough, or is there some higher standard? One item that makes a good example here is how we should decide on the status of Saturday night services. Can these be substituted for first-day-of-the-week gatherings of the church? What principles should be used to decide such questions? 

Pragmatism is seductively persuasive to many Americans. It was, after all, one of the first philosophies native to America. Once we decide what we want, which is what “it works” often really means, it becomes very difficult for some people to consider the alternatives. Sometimes it can come down to a choice between pragmatism and Apostolic practice. 

Without reviewing the case here, it seems very clear that Apostolic precedent requires that Christians not abandon a first-day-of-the-week gathering where the Lord’s supper is observed, but what if this just doesn’t “work” the way we think it should? Why not just substitute a Saturday gathering? If that is what “works,” then why not? 

What we think “works” is very often a function of the culture in which we live. This suggests still another consideration. 

The Lure of Culture 

Throughout the ages, the church has always existed in some culture. This, of course, is unavoidable. It is, however, often easier to “see” another culture than it is to notice your own. Failure to see your own culture makes it easy for the culture to influence the church, rather than the church influencing culture. 

In the early church, especially the eastern or Byzantine branch, the church became almost inextricably tied to the Roman empire. This led to an unhealthy identification of church and political society. When that society eventually began to break up, so did the church that was tied to it. 

Perhaps there is a lesson here for the Western church in the twenty-first century. If we tie the church too closely to the latest styles of music, the latest technologies, and the latest trends, what will happen to the church when those styles, technologies, and trends fade from the scene? 

This is not an argument for avoiding the technology, new styles, or anything else, for that matter. It is a warning not to identify the church with anything we find in our culture. 

There are always negative aspects to any culture, but even those neutral aspects of culture can become negative when we elevate them to the status of indispensability. While many aspects of a culture can be used as a bridge to reach the people of that culture, those things can never become a necessary part of the church. 

For example, multi-media presentations are very attractive in our culture, but they are not an essential part of the church. Or consider something much older. Church buildings can and have been very nice, but they are not a necessary aspect of the church. 

Search the pages of the New Testament, and you will find many things that are essential to the church, such as faith, hope, love, truth, and grace. This list could go on, but the problem is that so many of the things we think—sometimes we even insist—are important are not on this list. They are nice, but not necessary. If we attempt to make them necessary, they become idols, and we become idolaters. 

What Should We Do? 

The deterioration of the church, like that of any work of art, is something to which trustees of that art must ever be alert. Deterioration is to be expected, but it must be repaired if the artwork is to continue with its original beauty. When the church fades or cracks, it can be repaired, like a work of art, with some of the materials of which it is composed. Truth, applied in love, can restore the church, but it must be applied. 

Such an application is not often easy. With a deteriorating work of art, there is sometimes reluctance to disturb that work as it exists in any way. Its trustees are sometimes afraid that in attempting to repair the work of art, it might be damaged. There is, it seems, often a similar fear in the case of the wayward church. Will changes in direction back toward the Apostolic practice crack the church? Will a turn toward the truth cause the body to break apart? 

Those, of course, are always possibilities, but when the alternative is considered, it is a risk worth taking. A church steering a course away from the Apostolic teaching will only continue to move further away. Though perhaps we cannot always draw a clear line on all matters, there must come a point when what is called a church is no longer a church because it has moved too far from the Word of God. The ecclesiastical landscape is littered with entities called “church” that are really not the church. Obvious examples like the Metropolitan Church (for practicing homosexuals) come to mind, but we are naive if we begin to think that digressions from the church described in Scripture must be that obvious to be important. 

The church of the twenty-first century will face all sorts of “isms.” When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? That is a question challenging to ask but dangerous to ignore.