Church or community?
TEST post from older project
Christianity Today is hosting a helpful review of Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer. The review is overtly positive on what I think is subpar book in many ways. His previous book, Live no lies, has a more compelling and honest look at the challenges the church is facing from the World, Flesh, and the devil, ones that I don’t think are solved by the current obsession with Rules of Life. It’s my opinion that the Rule of Life zeitgeist is tied our current obsession with self-optimization, but this is different because it is for Jesus!
But one critique that is far more than blip but takes a fine book and makes it a bad book is the turn from church to community. The reviewer writes:
The comment is this: Community is a noun, not a verb. Comer treats it like a verb, though, encouraging readers to “practice community.” I know what he means, but the problem is twofold. On one hand, it threatens to reduce the church — the chosen people of God, the body and bride of Christ, the beloved family of Abraham — to “needing others for the journey.” The church is no longer the secret mystery and final end of the Lord’s saving work but rather the desired social accompaniment for individual apprentices who can’t “go it alone.”
In spiritual formation literature it is often that church is replaced by the discipline of ‘community.’ This is no surprise considering the ecclesiological locations of its two best proponents: Dallas Willard was Baptist and Richard Foster a quaker.
This error is damning and reduces the community of believers to fulfilling a need alongside other needs. Not only that it makes the disciplines flow out of my own personal drive rather than the common worship shared together with other Christians. In that view our personal disciplines are connected to our corporate ones and gain their meaning from the larger body. In the Rule of Life/Spiritual formation framework whatever the corporate body is it doesn’t touch those things and may detract from them. That detraction most clearly shows up in the idea of sabbath and the need to reclaim a personal one. Much of this literature will have the individual believer, and more often pastor, decide on a day of sabbath for themselves. But what’s lost in all this it is not man that determine the sabbath day, but the Lord and it is not practiced solo as a family but a community of believers for Jew on Saturday and for the Christian on Sunday.
What Christians need more of today is less a personal path for our fulfillment and transformation but a body of people, the church, calling us out of the self to God, and others. I’m sure I’ll write about this more at future date but it was Phillip Turner who said the question for the Christian is not ‘how am I doing?’ with my own spiritual walk and rule of life but ‘how are we doing?’ as the community of God that is contrast to the world.