A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Harvie M. Conn is Professor of Missions and Editor, Urban Mission at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, PA.

I’m not against renewal. And I’m not against the growth of the church. I’ve seen it everywhere — twelve years in Korea, visits to four continents.

But in these visits I hear strident voices. The black son of a Christian pastor, now a Muslim, stops to talk in my front yard. ‘I’m not against Jesus; I just don’t dig his church.” An angry professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, shouts at me, “Jesus would never identify his church if he visited our country today.”

A young man leaves his church in Brazil and says to a concerned missionary, “You Protestants are anxious to make people give up drinking and smoking. The Communists are concerned about the relief of suffering and injustice.” A Western student of urban church growth in Latin America writes of the “negligible impact of the evangelical church as a whole on the gradually emerging new society and the isolation of the churches from the totality of human life.”

It sounds like the words of the nineteenth century philosopher, Soren Kierekegaard. “Whereas Christ turned water into wine, the church has succeeded in doing something more difficult; it has turned wine into water.” Renewal movements take on the appearance of week-long revival meetings. Church Growth, whether intended or not, becomes a slogan for mathematics, not mission.

One Missing Element
Part of the answer, and only part, is the disengagement of church renewal from society’s renewal, our compartmentalization of life into safety zones — one labelled “private faith”, another labelled “public life.” Reformation in the church has been reduced to a skirmish centered on the proper recovery of doctrinal formulations for use by Christians in the church. But the larger battle zone no longer finds the church at issue with community or society over worldview dimensions big enough to challenge the giants.

We are busy renewing contemplative churches but not world-forming societies of the King. Our definitions of holiness have been built around the “perfection of innocence in which one is shielded from the world.”1 We are in danger of forgetting the definition of holiness provided by Job’s confession: “I delivered the poor who cried for help, and the orphan who has no helper … I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy and I investigated the case which I did not know” (Job 29: 12-16).

That is part of the picture I see when I read Reginald Bibby’s picture of religion in Canada, Fragmented Gods. The Canada of 1887 was a country where the church and its faith provided a religion that was “the driving force behind thought and action, the best excuse for the exercise of power, and the only consolation for sickness, death and worldly failure.”2 The gospel was large enough to “give life its gravity.”

But now, translating Bibby into my own idiom, the gospel in Canada has been reduced to a “two-service Sunday.” Many evangelical Protestants, while emphasizing that religion should influence the entirety of life, have tended to focus upon individuals and personal morality to the exclusion of culture and social structure.”3

It is summed up well in the 1984 words of the Anglican Archbishop of Toronto, Lewis Garnsworthy: “We survive — great Coronations, charming at weddings and impressive at funerals as long as we don’t eulogize. We are welcome mascots at family do’s and offer respectability to the Christmas cocktail circuit. We grace only community as long as we stay out of social issues and do not change a jot or tittle of well-worn liturgy.’’4

For Bibby, what he calls “religion” has ceased to be life-informing at the level of the average Canadian. Am I right in suggesting that the problem may be closer to home? The gospel has ceased to be life-informing at the level of the evangelical church.

In our legitimate concerns over the Social Gospel, have we retreated too far from the motto of William Booth, “soup, soap and salvation?” In our reaction against churches whose agenda is more social than gospel, why do we so easily underscore the spiritual mission of the church and underestimate its integrity with social service? John Wesley called on us to uphold both personal morality and “social holiness.”

Christoph Blumhardt, the Pietist, asked, “What use is it to prattle about the kingdom of heaven if you leave your fellow men in their fetters and bonds, the slaves in their chairs, and the oppressed in their misery?” The spiritual forebear of Presbyterians, John Calvin, affirmed, “All that the church possesses, either in lands or in money, is the property of the poor” (Institutes, IV.4.6.)

The history of the Korean church is the history of growth, from 300,000 believers at the end of World War II to 8,500,000 in 1980. The church has virtually doubled in size every ten years.

Yet a 1983 book authored by Korea’s evangelical community, Korean Church Growth Explosion, can also speak of grave dangers in this rapid growth — unsound mysticism, self-righteousness, faith without works, self-preoccupation. And repeatedly there occur sentences like, “. . . little emphasis on Christian social responsibilities . . or, “In Korea the communication of the gospel is overemphasized and edification and the transformation of culture and society are ignored.”5 What is wrong?

Recovering a Kingdom Worldview

About forty years ago in the United States, a little book written by Carl F.H. Henry made its plea for “fundamentalist” renewal. The Uneasy Conscience of Modem Fundamentalism made its debut in 1947, a book written out of frustration over evangelical silence about the social dimensions of the gospel.

Evangelical strength for two decades had been poured into the “liberal-fundamentalist” controversy. Ecclesiastical renewal increasingly was being defined in terms of “separation from unbelief.” Renewal was beginning to sound more angry than angelic.

One of the unnecessary side-effects of the necessary struggle was a reduction of biblical ethics to strictly personal ethics, and personal ethics to simple negations (“We do not do x or y or z”).

Henry called on the church to recover its past heritage and step out boldly with solutions for the most pressing world problems. “It must offer a formula for a new world mind with spiritual ends, involving evangelical affirmations in political, economic, sociological and educational realms, local and international.”6

That could come about, he argued, with a recovery of biblical teaching concerning the kingdom of God. He saw a marked hesitancy among evangelicals about kingdom preaching. And he called on us to do four things: “(1) to reawaken to the relevance of its redemptive message to the global predicament; (2) to stress the great evangelical agreements in a common world front; (3) to discard elements of its message which cut the nerve of world compassion as contradictory to the inherent genius of Christianity; (4) to restudy eschatological convictions for a proper perspective which will not unnecessarily dissipate evangelical strength in controversy over secondary positions ”7

In the years since Henry wrote, the North American church has called for renewal and written its books — good ones — on the kingdom of God. But Henry’s four challenges, with modifications for a now politically-sensitive “fundamentalism”, still sound fresh. And unfulfilled. Where do we begin?

  1. The doctrinal agenda that is crucial for a defense of biblical Christianity seems oriented too much to the “church insiders” rather than to the “worldly outsider.” Theology, even kingdom theology, has become “in house” reflection. It is in danger of losing its perspective as reflections in mission, in pilgrimage amidst our society’s struggles. It is in danger of losing its perspective as reflections in mission, in pilgrimage amidst our society’s struggles. It is in danger of losing its perspective as reflection on mission, on Jesus as both the justice and justification of the kingdom, on the church as salt and light and leaven for our society. Theology creates not pilgrims, but tourists.

Paul did his theologizing always with an eye on “those who are without” (Col. 4:5, 1 Thess. 4:12). They were before him as he uttered his theological malediction  of “shame” on those Christians who institute lawsuits  against other Christians (1 Cor. 6:1-5). His deliberation on the use of tongues in the assembly are prompted by his sensitivity to how all this will be seen by the unbeliever (1 Cor. 14:23-24).

By and large, most of us have not learned how to do theology that way, not even kingdom theology. We do not see the kingdom as “God’s foreign policy”, only as Sunday’s pulpit preparation. And the world responds to that kind of orientation the same way a young man did to me this summer in Vancouver: “God doesn’t give a ____ for the world; he spends all his time in church.”

  1. Discussions of the kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus continue to get lost somewhere between the “already” of the kingdom come in Christ and the “not yet” of the kingdom coming in Christ. Particularly in the evangelical community we run the danger of reducing the words of John, “he has made us to be a kingdom” (Rev. 1:6), into a functional future tense.

We can spend too much time debating the sequence of events surrounding the second coming and the final establishment of his kingdom. And in the process we debate the when more than the what and how and who. The kingdom call of Jesus to do world-scale battle against the kingdom of Satan (Matt. 12:28) is reduced to apocalyptic speculation. And all are tempted here, whatever millennial label we choose to wear.

Renewal came to the twentieth century church in Holland when a theologian by the name of Abraham Kuyper recovered the “in between” dimensions of the kingdom of God. He saw the church as the citizens of the kingdom, called to incarnate a renewed human society living in accord with God’s royal will in Christ. And he was their role with regard to the “outsider” — a model home, God’s demonstration community, the firstfruits of redeemed humanity. “Kingdom activity” became Kuyper’s slogan phrase to describe the wholeness of this commitment his antidote for those churches that “can get such an interior look that they lose the kingdom horizon of the world.”7

Reginald Bibby fears an “a la carte” religion in Canada where God, self and society have been fragmented and need to be reconnected. Who will put Humpty Dumpty together again?

A former moderator of the United Church of Canada warns that “polarization in the United Church is due to the failure on the part of those of us who have a high commitment to social action to be seen as evangelical, and the failure of evangelicals to realize the fullness of the Gospel.”8 Can renewal fly without both faith- and-action wings of the bird?

Endnotes

  1. Donald G. Bloesch, The Evangelical Renaissance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), p. 71.
  2. Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1987), p. 97.
  3. Ibid., pp. 257-258.
  4. Ibid., p.5.
  5. Bong-rin Ro and Marlin Nelson, eds., Korean Church Growth Explosion (Seoul: Word of Life Press, 1983), pp. 338, 340.
  6. Carl F.H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), pp. 10, 26, 28.
  7. Robert Recker, The Redemptive Focus of the Kingdom of God (reprint from the Calvin Theological Journal, Vol. 14 [1979], 154-186), p. 29.
  8. Bibby, op. cit., p. 268.