Ecclesia vs Church

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No ministry I know that is labeled as postmodern or emerging seems to welcome the categorization. I believe that is due, in part, to the immense diversity that exists within these labels. Churches given the same moniker can be vastly different in terms of theology, structure, and practice. Nevertheless, there are some marks that are more commonly shared among these churches than others.

One of these defining marks that I have identified is a reformation of our understanding of the Church. Again, it takes many forms, but churches living firmly in the ethos of postmodern thought embrace a struggle to more authentically resemble the Ecclesia of the New Testament. For many, this results in a heightened missional passion and practice. There is often an emphasis on the Church's role in bringing the Kingdom of God to the world, rather than expecting the world to come to "church." For others, there is a great desire to recapture the place of the gathered body of believers as the central expression of what it means to be Church.

Threshold Church shares this struggle with many of our brothers and sisters in Christ. It was this welcome agitation that attracted me to a small, old book by theologian Emil Brunner. The book was mentioned in the midst of another I was reading and piqued my interest. The name of the book is The Misunderstanding of the Church. Having read the book, I would like to propose that it is required reading for every church leader struggling to understand the Church in the midst of the Postmodern milieu. In an effort to pique your interest, I am going to share some brief musings on each chapter over the course of the next several weeks.

Chapter one of Brunner's book is entitled The Supernatural Christian Community and the Problem of the Church. There he sets out the problem that confronts us.

"The Ecclesia of the New Testament, the fellowship of Christian believers, is precisely not that which every 'church' is at least in part—and institution, a something. The Body of Christ is nothing other than a fellowship of persons. It is 'the fellowship of Jesus Christ' or 'fellowship of the Holy Ghost', where fellowship or koinonia signifies a common participation, a togetherness, a community life. The faithful are bound to each other through their common sharing in Christ and in the Holy Ghost, but that which they have in common is precisely no 'thing', no 'it', but a 'he', Christ and the Holy Spirit. It is just in this that resides the miraculous, the unique, the once-for-all nature of the Church: that as the Body of Christ it has nothing to do with an organization and has nothing of the character of the institutional about it. This is precisely what it has in mind when it describes itself as the Body of Christ."

For Brunner, this reality of the New Testament Ecclesia is what makes it impossible to equate it with the present expression of the Church. As Brunner will lay out in the chapters ahead, the Church has so far departed from the original expression of the Ecclesia as to be unidentifiable with it. Here at the outset, he begins to establish why. The Church, as history has delivered it to us, is inseparable from its institutional standpoint. This "institutional distortion" of the Ecclesia has led to two erroneous views of the Church. In the first, we see "the replacement of a communion of persons by the legal administrative institution." Within this understanding of the Church we see dogma and government completely obscuring the movement of the Ecclesia "which is a pure communion of persons without institutional character." The equally erroneous opposing response to this, made by the protestant reformers, is the concept of the ecclesia invisibilis, the Invisible Church. At its most basic level, the doctrine of the Invisible Church declares that the true Church is defined by the sum of true believers which remains hidden amidst the world and the institution called the Church. Therefore, the ecclesia invisibilis exists as a group of individuals relationally disconnected. The problem is that this, too, robs the Ecclesia of its fundamentally indentifying mark which is fellowship.

The nature of the Ecclesia, explains Brunner, is the combining of the vertical with the horizontal, divine with human communion in an utterly unparalleled life that is unintelligible apart from its supernatural and miraculous character as the "fellowship of Christ" and the "fellowship one with the other." Next time, The Historical Origin of the Ecclesia.

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