False Dichotomies, Part Five

The final entry in Chris Wright's list of false dichotomies created by evangelicals is our tendency to separate evangelism from ecclesiology, and to prioritize the first. That is, when we talk about "the whole church bringing the whole gospel to the whole world", we see the church only as a delivery mechanism, a postman delivering a letter. It doesn’t really matter if the postman who delivers my letter was having an adulterous affair last night, so long as he does his job and I get the letter. We are concerned to get the maximum number of people into heaven – we even speak of it as a ‘task to get finished’ - but have not got a clear, strong and biblical affirmation of what the church is meant to be here and now. The church itself is the product of the gospel, and the living demonstration, embodiment of the gospel’s transformative, unifying power (as we have seen in Ephesians), as a community of reconciled sinners. Instead our ecclesiology has a ‘lifeboat church’ or a ‘container church’ picture - the church is just somewhere to keep all the evangelized together until we all get to heaven. This is very deficient and far below Paul’s understanding and teaching.

The bad result of this is that the church itself can be riddled with sin, idolatry, abuses, and disunity, but we don’t care very much, so long as evangelism carries on. This is why part of our purpose in Lausanne must be prophetic, in the biblical sense. The prophets most often addressed, not so much the nations outside and their sins (though they did, of course), but the people of God themselves and their idolatries. If we are to be good news and to preach good news, we must seek a greater humility, repentance and return to the Lord. If we are to introduce Christ to the world we must look like the Christ we represent. So the call for integrity, Christlikeness, unity, etc., within the church, as part of a more robust understanding of what the church is meant to be, is an essential part of our missional task.