The prophetic community of the King

There is a tendency for churches today to set up different ministries to cater to different groups of people. People can be segregated into “homogenous units” in terms of race, language, age, or any other characteristics. I know of churches that conduct separate worship services for people with intellectual disabilities. But is this what God intends His church to be?

The justification for this practice may sound reasonable. After all, what other church models can be more efficient than this in meeting the needs of a particular group of people? Don’t we all feel more comfortable being with our own kind (or at least being spared the awkwardness of having to relate with those who are different from us)? And who can argue with church growth gurus who recommend this as a key strategy for drawing people to the local church?

Howard A. Snyder, long recognised as one of the leading thinkers on church renewal, has this to say:

The very existence of the Christian community is a sign of the kingdom of God… The kingdom mandate of the church is both evangelistic and prophetic.

… The church is prophetic when it creates and sustains a reconciled and reconciling community of believers (2 Cor 5:16-21; Eph 2; Phil 2:1-11; Col 1:21-23). When this happens, evangelism takes on prophetic dimensions. Reconciliation with God is demonstrated by genuine reconciliation within the Christian community and by a continuing ministry of healing reconciliation in the world.

This means that in each local Christian assembly, reconciliation must be more than a theory and more than an invisible spiritual transaction. It must be visible and social. Racial, gender and economic exploitation and all forms of elitism (including that of a professional clergy) must be challenged biblically. Unholy divisions in the body of Christ must be seen as sin and worldliness (1 Cor 3:3-4). Likewise, each church must work or bring full reconciliation between marriage partners, between parents and children, and between employer and employee when alienation and discord in these relationships are discovered (Eph 5:1-6:9).

The church is prophetic when it creates communities that visibly transcend the divisions in society that result from racism, economic or social marginalization, or other forms of injustice and oppression. Faithful churches reject the notion that the church should be made up of “homogeneous units” so as to speed up church growth. The New Testament gospel calls the church to be a community of visible reconciliation. As René Padilla noted, the early apostles “sought to build communities in which Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, poor and rich would worship together and learn the meaning of their unity in Christ right from the start, although they often had to deal with difficulties arising out of the differences in background or social status among the converts.” The early church “not only grew, but it grew across cultural barriers.” Clearly the apostles “never contemplated the possibility of forming homogenous unit churches that would then express their unity [merely] in terms of interchurch relationships. Each church was meant to portray the oneness of its members regardless of their racial, cultural, or social differences.” (C. René Padilla, ‘Mission Between the Times’ [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985], pp. 160, 167.) Based on a study of the New Testament, Padilla rightly concluded:

The breaking down of the barriers that separate people in the world was regarded as an essential aspect of the gospel, not merely as a result of it. Evangelism therefore involved a call to be incorporated into a new humanity that included all kinds of people. Coversion was never a merely religious experience; it was also a means of becoming a member of a community in which people would find their identity in Christ rather than in race, social status, or sex. The apostles would have agreed with [Edmund] Clowney’s dictum that “the point at which human barriers are surmounted is the point at which a believer is joined to Christ and his people.” (Ibid., pp. 166-67; see Edmund Clowney, “The Missionary Flame of Reformed Theology,” in ‘Theological Perspectives on Church Growth’, ed. Harvie M. Conn [Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1976], p. 167.)

For this reason the “homogeneous unit” theory of church growth is unacceptable as an intentional strategy, however helpful it may be in understanding the dynamics of church growth in some contexts and in reminding us to take seriously the important role of ethnicity, language and other cultural dynamics. (Some twentieth-century church-growth theorists, particularly Donald McGavran and Peter Wagner, advocated the so-called homogeneous unit principle as a strategy in church growth. In fact there seems to be no such principle in Scripture, so this approach might better be called the “homogeneous unit ‘theory’.”)

All communities by definition must have some degree of homogeneity in order to exist. The gospel in fact has its own principle of homogeneity, and it is called ‘reconciliation in Christ’. Within the church, the degree of both homogeneity and diversity will, of course, vary from place to place, depending on the cultural context, as we see in the New Testament. (Note the description of the church in Antioch in Acts 11 and 13. The church in Antioch was much more diverse than the early Jerusalem church, yet “a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord,” and Paul and Barnabas discipled “great numbers.” In large measure because of its diversity, now including Gentiles as well as Jews, “the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch” [Acts 11:21-26].) But the key point of commonality, the glue that holds the church together (if it is true to the gospel), is reconciliation through Jesus Christ. Based on that reconciliation, diverse persons of diverse social situations are made one community, one body. This diversity-in-unity is a key, unique feature of the community of the king. (Diversity is as much a “mark” of the church as is unity, though of course the precise demographic and sociological contours of that diversity will vary greatly according to the cultural context. [See Snyder and Runyon, ‘Decoding the Church’, chap. 1.] Minimally, the diversity of the church will normally include differences of age, gender, personality and spiritual gifts, and usually much more. The greater the range of social heterogeneity united and reconciled in the church, the greater the ‘visible social demonstration’ of the power of the gospel that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. It would be a distortion of the gospel, however, to define acceptable diversity so broadly as to include behaviors that are incompatible with Jesus’ teachings.) In this sense, a church’s homogeneity should be its diversity. The key “homogeneous principle” that unites diverse Christians is their oneness in Christ, and a key mark of a faithful church in most contexts is its diversity.

Today there are some hopeful signs. A growing number of congregations are demonstrating that diverse, multiethnic churches can grow healthily and reproduce themselves, just as in the days of the early church. (See, for example, Manuel Ortiz, ‘One New People: Models for Developing a Multiethnic Church’ [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996]; Stephen A. Rhodes, ‘Where the Nations Meet: The Church in a Multicultural World [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998].) Given the biblical picture of the kingdom of God, it is clear that the creation of such reconciled, reconciling communities is one key to the church’s prophetic witness.

Such communities of reconciliation find themselves living in tension with surrounding culture. The differences and distance between the Christian community and the larger human community will vary from one time and place to another, depending on the extent to which culture is godless and under Satan’s dominion. As society becomes more godless, the church must increasingly both see itself and actually structure itself as a self-conscious counterculture. This is necessary for the church’s own faithfulness to the gospel and for any true prophetic role in the world. In much of the world the church is moving into an era when it must increasingly take on the marks of a counterculture. (Michael L. Budde and Robert W. Brimlow, eds., ‘The Church as Counterculture’ [Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000]; Darrell L. Guder, ed., ‘Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America’ [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998]; John R.W. Stott, ‘The Message of the Sermon on the Mount’ [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1978]. Stott notes, “If the church realistically accepted [Jesus’] standards and values as here set forth [in the Sermon on the Mount], and lived by them, it would be the alternative society he always intended it to be, and would offer to the world an authentic Christian counter-culture” [p. 10].)

(Howard A. Snyder, ‘The Community of the King’, Rev. ed. [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004], pp. 116, 125-28.)

Given the trade-offs between efficiency and inclusion (along with all its inconveniences, irritations and disruptions), I believe God wants us to choose the narrow path that leads to life.