The Essence of the Church

LDR 701/SFM 701 The Transformational Leader
Date of course:
January 10-21, 2005
Student
Ross Rohde
Book
Van Gelder, Craig. The Essence of the Church. Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000 Read 208 of 208 pages

I. What is the main idea or thesis of the author?

Van Gelder explores what it means to be church. He is not trying to find what the next great technique will be, how to do church, or even how to be pragmatically successful. That would tend to give emphasis on the human dimensions of church life. The Church, as reviled in the Bible, is much more than a human institution. Biblical theology and ecclesiology must take precedence over sociology and pragmatism or what we end up with is a caricature of the Church or a warped understanding of the Church. Van Gelder ends his book with a final thought: It has been the argument of this book that we need to rethink the church from the framework of a missiological ecclesiology (page 184). In other words, he is not merely asking what the church is; nor how do we do church, but what is God doing through the church. This does relate to what the Church is and how we go about expressing our “churchness”.

II. What is my interpretation of the author’s thesis?

I appreciate Van Gelder’s biblical, missiological and holistic approach to ecclesiology. For too long we have been pragmatic, trying to use the social sciences to answer our questions rather than returning to the scriptures to find our path. This reflects our humanistic enlightened worldview more than our spiritual connection with God. I believe we have inadvertently made the Church into something that it wasn’t intended to be, and in doing so we have lost much of our witness to a spiritually hungry world, which would say to us, we are looking for something, but when we look at you we are not interested.

However, while I appreciate Van Gelder’s approach I would have liked to have seen him be more introspective of his own presuppositions. At times I felt he would state a good principle and then step away from it as he would describe its application. In Chapter five, for example, he speaks of the core Biblical images of the Church. The core biblical images for the church all develop a common theme: the church is a social community. These images help us understand that the visible church in the world, with all its organizational and institutional characteristics, is to be understood primarily as a social fellowship of persons (page 107-108). I believe he rightly points out that the biblical images of the church are social and communal, but they are also organized organically, not institutionally. We are the People of God, we are the body with Christ as the Head, we are the communion of saints living under the authority and power of the Spirit, and we are the creation of the Spirit. Van Gelder would have done better to question his own presuppositions about the institutional nature of the church.

While he acknowledges that the New Testament Church was predominantly house church networks which he describes fairly well, he doesn’t seem to understand the dynamic relation between their big expressions of networks and their small expressions of individual house churches. Instead he ends up describing the current congregational nature of the church with its institutional organization and denominational structures. He does this uncritically. He takes for granted that this is just the way it is. His “justification’ is that we need to understand the historical development of the church, as well as its biblical and contextual elements. While I would agree that the church needs to contextualize itself and that we don’t want to merely copy 1st Century practice, we need to clearly delineate, as much as possible, between biblical principle and 1st Century contextualization. We need to understand our history without assuming that history is neutral or that the church has always made wise decisions in its contextualization.

For example, the Church is never biblically described as having an institutional organization. There is no doubt whatsoever that it ended up patterning itself after the Roman government. This process probably started sometime in the second century and was fully developed and finalized at the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. But just because it happened, doesn’t mean it was healthy. This historical development has become an unquestioned tradition in the last 1700 years, but it has done damage to what the Church was designed by God to be. Because Van Gelder was uncritical of this historical reality he was not able to discuss the problematic nature of this development. While Van Gelder is somewhat critical of the clergy/laity distinction he again seems to take it for granted and doesn’t particularly address its problematic nature.

III. What would a serious application of this book look like?

I want to give credit to Van Gelder’s holistic, biblical and missional approach to ecclesiology. This is well worth emulating. We should go to the Bible first in seeing what the biblical design for the church really is. We should not only look at the form of the Church but see how this is related to the Missio Dei, what God want to do through his Church to redeem his world. It is this holistic approach that reflects on not only form but mission and how those are related to each other that helps us get away from a strictly pragmatic sociological approach which reflects the Enlightenment more than God’s divine lordship, guidance and power over and in the Church.