A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. A. Donald MacLeod is the pastor of Newton Presbyterian Church in Boston, Massachusetts, and former chairperson of the Renewal Fellowship.

Inevitably, in our conversation with complete strangers, the question always surfaces. After all, it’s a normal opener after one has discussed the weather, the state of the economy, or the price of groceries.

“Who do you work for?”
I’ve tried a variety of answers.
Just recently someone tried to give me directions to a hardware store in Waltham.
“Just near the cemetery,” I reflected.
“How do you know about cemeteries?” I was asked.
“I often visit there.”
“Really?”
“I’m a minister.”
And then – if I may say so – a deadly pause.

People have mixed feelings about the ministry and clergy in general and churches in particular. I’m reminded of a well-known churchman, asked to m.c. a banquet in New York City. Seated next to him was a well-known actor, famous for his dissolute life and generally irreligious behaviour. As the time for grace arrived and the minister invited to make the prayer failed to arrive, the chairman turned to the actor and asked if he could oblige. He got up and with a hushed voice he paused and he bowed and said: “As there are no clergy here, let us thank God.”

People feel ambivalent about clergy and about the church. “Not many years ago”, a lead article in the London Times stated, “a plausible case could still be made for the survival of the Christian churches. But things have got worse… Who wants to belong to a church that has nothing to offer but a secular version of the gospels, that has lost its nerve to evangelize and takes refuge in the smug alleluias of pentecostalism?”

That outsiders should feel this way about the church is understandable, perhaps even excusable. But, curiously, a large group within the church feels just the same way. For evangelicals the church can also be a vague embarrassment, our commitment to it limited. Much of our allegiance is to what we call parachurch organizations, like InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, a missionary agency, a conference or camp, a Bible Study group. As the former minister of one of the larger Presbyterian Churches in the U.S. noted in his challenging Mainline Churches and the Evangelicals, “the evangelical parachurch organizations have provided the major organization pattern and formed the institutional base of the evangelical renewal.”

Lausanne I was the creation of a parachurch agency: the highly respected Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Its Covenant contained what one observer has described as “ecclesiological ambiguity … characteristic of the evangelical movement as a whole in our day.” It stated: “The church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution.” And that contrast, as this person noted, lies at the heart of much of our misunderstanding of the church.

To set “the community of faith” off against “an institution” is a deadly polarity. It provides an easy “out” for me to fail to fulfil my obligation to the local church, to attend its worship consistently Sunday by Sunday, to be involved in its boring and frustrating details, its committee meetings, its petty irritations, its inequities, its routine day-to-day operations. It makes it easy for me to sit in judgement over against “them” and to assume greater knowledge, greater zeal, and – alas – greater detachment. My loyalty is to the church as “a community of God’s people” not to an institution. And I am primarily committed to organizations who, unlike the local church, are really spiritual, really focussed, really getting on with the job.

The job, of course, is evangelization. And here the local church has been very weak. We are unfocussed. Only recently have the mainline churches discovered “evangelism.” We’re not always clear what we mean by the word, but we know that we must reverse plummeting denominational statistics or we will soon be out of business. And parachurch agencies have helped evangelize communities that we ignored: students, young people, the poor, even entire countries.

The local church must be called back to its priority, its basic function. And those of us who have been helped by parachurch agencies must be first in our commitment to help it do so. We have the tools, the priorities, the vision. Rather than adopting a detachment to what happens at eleven o’clock Sunday morning, or what our children are taught at nine-thirty, or the long board meeting that lasts until midnight wrangling over the colour of the plumbing in the lady’s washroom, let’s roll up our sleeves and get on with it. And it was Dr. Jong-Yun Lee, pastor of Seoul’s Choong Hyun Presbyterian Church, a congregation of 20,000 members in the heart of that city, that was asked to redress the balance. “When we call for ‘The Whole Church to Take the Whole Gospel to the Whole World,’ we are calling for each and every local church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.”

The local church must be called back to its priority, its basic function. And those of us who have been helped by parachurch agencies must be first in our commitment to help it do so.

Dr. Lee, in his talk on “The Priority of the Local Church in World Evangelization” focussed on two congregations in the book of Acts: the church in Jerusalem and the church in Antioch: a mother church to a daughter church that became a sister church and finally a mother church. A church that evangelized and a church that was evangelized and that then evangelized. What Dr. Lee was asking was: what kind of a church is getting on with “the job?” What kind of local church is it that has primacy in the task of world evangelization? For there are local churches that are not God’s primary instruments for world evangelization.

Acts 4:23-31 tells us four things about the church in Jerusalem that made them effective instruments:

The expectancy of its worship (“Gathering”): to the early Christians assembling for worship was not an option, not even an obligation, but a glorious opportunity. The key thought connected with “ekklesia”, Greek for church in the New Testament, is the thought of gathering. After being questioned by the Sanhedrin Peter and John report their experience to the church. Prayer is offered – and after prayer the place “where they were gathered together was shaken.” Notice some important things about their coming together – there is a sense of expectancy, an anticipation that God is present, that he does hear prayer, that he will speak through his Word. Christian believers knew that their very identity was not individual but corporate, not solo but in chorus, not “me” but “us.”

The Spirit of its power (“Anointing”): God not only speaks in his Word through the Holy Spirit (v. 25: “who by the mouth of… David … said by the Holy Spirit”) but a prayer for power (w. 29 and 30: “speak the word with boldness … heal… signs and wonders …”) is a prayer for the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit. “When they had prayed the place… was shaken.. .they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God with boldness.” He concluded: “The whole church faces a crisis of misplaced emphasis. With modernization comes materialism … which causes our emphasis to be placed on visible material blessing, rather than on the invisible spiritual blessing of the Holy Spirit.”

The authority of its instruction (“Teaching”): The apostles taught with a reliance on Scripture as the word not of humankind, but of the Spirit of God. It was the word of God that was to give them boldness (v. 29) not their own cleverness or rhetoric, and their being filled with the Holy Spirit meant that such a Word came across with power and grace. Their testimony (v. 32) was to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus of which they were eyewitnesses. “Unwavering reliance upon the Scriptures within each and every local church is the key. As pastors stress the authority of God’s Word in the local church, the direct result will be a movement of evangelization, because sound teaching is the basis for bold witnessing.”

The winsomeness of its outreach (“Witnessing”): Because they were so well taught in the Word, they were able to share it (v. 31), accompanying their testimony with prayer, and increasing its range and geographical spread. Nothing could silence them, and increasing numbers (4:4) came to personal faith and belief. “The whole church” – we were told – “faces a crisis of priorities. Witnessing the gospel must be maintained as our top priority. Local churches play the key role, especially each local pastor and the trained laity.”

This is the church: gathered, anointed, instructed, witnessing. It is not the church in Newton (where A. Donald MacLeod is pastor), nor is it even the church in Korea as Dr. Lee would be the first to admit. The tension between what we are and what we should be, what we lack and what we could possess, is always there. We are continually, in our thinking about the church, flitting (as C.S. Lewis says) “between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.” The danger is not that there is that gap between reality and vision but rather that we as the church will settle for being less than God wants to be, that we will lose the vision of what we can be.

“And when they had prayed the place in which they were gathered together was shaken: and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.”