Klink The Local Church

What It Is and Why It Matters for Every Christian
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7139-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

How God Ministers to His People and the World through the Local Church The church is more than coffee with friends-it's a meaningful gathering of Christians that involves fellowship and growing in biblical truth. Given the rise of the internet and the availability of streaming church services, many ministry leaders and church members are asking questions about the purpose and mission of the local church: What is the church? Why does the church exist? How does the church function? What is the connection between the Christian and the church? Pastor and trusted scholar Edward Klink III addresses these questions and more with a thoughtful assessment of what the Bible has to say about God's intention for the local church body. Klink stresses its importance as God's way of revealing his presence, displaying his power, fulfilling his purposes, and manifesting his activity in the world. In today's hyperindividualized culture, this book not only demonstrates why it's vital for individuals to connect to a local church, but also reveals why it's vital to God's work in the world.

Edward W. Klink III (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is the senior pastor of Hope Evangelical Free Church in Roscoe, Illinois. He previously served as associate professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He is the author of several books, including The Local Church; Understanding Biblical Theology; and John, a volume in the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Klink, Edward

Leseproben

1

What Isn’t the Church?

(Problem)

I remember entering the office of my doctoral supervisor to discuss with him the first written work I had produced as a PhD student in New Testament. In the British educational system, a professor takes a handful of doctoral students and serves as their Doktorvater (doctoral father), something like a Jedi Knight training Padawan learners in Star Wars. My professor had accepted me to work with him on a project in the Gospel of John, and I was excited to have him engage with what I had begun to do. After he asked if I wanted tea (also very British), my excitement turned to shock when his first words to me were these: “Mr. Klink, do you know how to read?” I was silent; I did not know exactly how to respond to such a question. My Doktorvater continued by explaining how good students read, and how too many students (and I presume me, based on this lecture) had poor reading habits or lacked skill in properly engaging, understanding, and utilizing the books and articles they read. Like a coach or trainer pushing an athlete, my Doktorvater exhorted me meeting after meeting to read more closely, to engage more critically, or to think more deeply on the material at hand. In short, there are good and bad habits and practices a student can display, and I was to avoid what is bad and practice what is good.

One would think this challenge would be given to a new or first-year student, not a doctoral student with an undergraduate degree and two master degrees. What I came to learn, however, is that my Doktorvater would first teach me what not to do before he would teach me what I should do. In other words, as in a construction site for a new building, the first task was deconstruction, clearing away obstacles and leveling the ground, before any construction could begin. And if deconstruction is needed in order to properly study Christianity, certainly it might be needed to properly practice Christianity as well.

In a very similar way, any talk of “the church” needs to begin with some deconstruction—the removal of bad definitions and understandings—before any good definitions and understandings can be appropriately built. But like me, most people might be surprised to hear this. Most people are not church beginners; they might have many years of Christian experience and church life in their past. In fact, it might even be offensive to be asked, Do you know what the church is? But just as students often need to be asked about proper reading and thinking, many Christians need to be asked about proper “churching”—that is, the what, why, and how of the church as taught in Scripture.

Misconceptions about “the Church”

We must begin by asking, What isn’t the church? The answer involves four common misconceptions of the church that I will address below. Each of these bad definitions or understandings has some biblical truth, but in theory or practice they all distort important aspects of what the Bible teaches about the church. It is important to realize that some of these misconceptions might not be articulated in words by the average Christian, but they reveal themselves in practices and habits. In short, the following four inaccurate definitions and understandings of the church are either explicit or implicit in contemporary Christianity. I’ll state them in terms of what the church is not.

The Church Is Not a Metaphor

For many Christians, “the church” is tossed around like the things of legend—a beautiful image that sounds more like a story of castles and Camelot than like any local church they have attended. The church is spoken of in theoretical language, as some spiritual ideal that exists in vague or mystical ways. That is, too often the way Christians speak of the church is really a metaphorical way of speaking of something else: community relationships between brothers and sisters in Christ or practices that help people grow in Christ. As much as a church does facilitate and organize relationships and practices, the church is more than a means to an end, a utilitarian resource for an individual Christian’s needs. To say it another way: the church is not a metaphor.

Two factors may have contributed to the dilution of “church” into a mystical metaphor. The first factor is the growing dominance of “spiritual” language. Over the last century “spirituality” has exploded across the globe. The term “spiritual” or “spirituality” began to arise in the fifth century but did not become normalized until the Middle Ages. The term began to morph in meaning around the eleventh century to describe the mental aspect of life (theoretical), in contrast to the material (physical). It even narrowed to refer to the realm of the inner life: motives, affections, inner dispositions, feelings, and a “spiritual life.” While the term is clearly biblical, most commonly utilized by the apostle Paul, it is never used in the Bible to separate the spiritual from the natural or physical, as it is now commonly used. The term “spiritual” in the Bible refers to a life (a person)—both body and soul—infused with and empowered by the Spirit of God.

The danger of a “spiritual life,” when defined in opposition to the physical world, is that such language can divorce Christian faith and practices from the real world. In a hyper-individualized culture, it is no wonder that so many Christians have lost sight of the ways their “spiritual lives” connect to real life, or more specifically, how their “spiritual lives” connect to the life of a local church. The error of a spiritual life disconnected from the physical world is that it fails to account for the full story the Bible tells and does not deal with the full person who eats, works, loves, and, if biblical, is intimately connected to a real, concrete local (located) church. The danger of a “spiritual life” is that it distorts both the spiritual and physical aspects of life.

The second factor is the mistaken emphasis on the “invisible” church. Pastors and theologians throughout the centuries have relied on the helpful categories of the visible and the invisible church in order to view churches in the present alongside the holy, universal (catholic) church throughout all time. Stated simply, the visible church is the church as we see it, and the invisible church is the church as God sees it. The distinction between the visible and the invisible church finds biblical grounding in Jesus’s prayer of dedication in John 17, a prayer heard by a local “gathering” and yet extended throughout all time and divisions. This prayer will be fully realized only when the chief Shepherd returns to finally “gather” his true and total church. This twofold category of the church was never an invitation for a Christian to affirm the church in its invisible sense alone (the church as God alone sees it) while ignoring the visible church (the church as we see it). Rather, its purpose was to help the Christian see the fullness of God’s people as told by the biblical story, even from the limited perspective of the local church in their own place and time.

Even though this distinction goes back all the way to Augustine, the Protestant Reformers regularly utilized it for pastoral purposes. John Calvin provides a helpful example in book 4 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin invokes these categories to give his readers spectacles not only to see the whole church—the visible (“the saints presently living”) and the invisible (“all the elect from the beginning of the world”)—but also to see their own church, which alongside the true children of God may also be “mingled” with “many hypocrites who have nothing of Christ but the name and outward appearance.”1 Pastorally, then, this category helps Christians deal with the hypocrisy they see in their own churches, without giving them warrant to reject or disregard the church. Even more, the Reformers used the distinction to unite the Christian to the church, not to allow for disassociation of any sorts. Calvin’s pastoral exhortation is worthy of note: “Just as we must believe, therefore, that the former church, invisible to us, is visible to the eyes of God alone, so we are commanded to revere and keep communion with the latter, which is called ‘church’ in respect to men.”2

This practical application of the visible and invisible church needs to be heard among Christians today. Too many Christians speak of “the church” in abstraction, in its invisible, mystical, and metaphorical sense, and not in a way that matches the church that we can see, attend, and join. Whether driven by the cultural emphasis on a mystical “spiritual life” or by the imbalanced theological leaning toward the invisible church, Christians are in great need of the located and visible church—their local church.

The Church Is Not Coffee with Friends

One of the most common inaccuracies regarding the church is actually derived from a mistaken reading of Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” For many contemporary Christians, the language in this verse suggests that a Christian gathering of more than one facilitates the ministering presence of Christ in such a way that this moment is equivalent to...