The Church is Irrelevant!

At least, that is what many people say. The church used to be a valued, integrated part of the rest of society. Perhaps you remember those days - they were not so long ago. The church was a sort of chaplain or sponsor to the larger society which considered itself “Christian.” It derived its significance through association with the identity and purposes of the state and the rest of society.[1] This role of the church in society began when the Roman emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Until then, the church was a persecuted or barely tolerated minority, living as a distinct culture within Roman society. The church was different. Christians were a peculiar people, stubbornly sticking to a way of life not in sync with that of the empire.

All that changed when the Emperor Constantine came along, had a strange vision in A.D. 312, and proclaimed Rome “Christian.” The distinction between the church as a peculiar people and the Empire was erased, and the church was integrated with the state and the larger aims of the Empire. Constantine and the Roman emperors after him saw Christianity as the unifying force that might bind and discipline their otherwise diverse subjects.[2] Thus it remained, more or less, until the Reformation in the 1500’s.

Martin Luther challenged the established Roman Catholic church and initiated a new movement of Christians seeking to be faithful to Scripture instead of tradition. A natural result of this was that the church began to distinguish itself from the state, as a visible people who were not to be identified with the status quo. Would that it had remained so! In between 1522 and 1525 the Reformers decided in favor of not challenging the synthesis between church and state. John Howard Yoder notes that “the conviction that the center of the meaning of history is in the work of the Church, which had been central in the pre-Constantinian Church and remained half-alive in the Middle Ages, is now expressly rejected… What is called “Church” is an administrative branch of the State on the same level with the Army or Post Office.”[3] The church returned to being comfortably normal, a valued and integrated part of the larger society.

No longer. Today the church is irrelevant by the standards of the larger society. Society no longer has use for us as its chaplain, conscience, or sponsor. Rodney Clapp notes that “Western civilization has been so powerful economically, militarily, technologically and culturally that the church, in sponsoring it, has seemed close to the centre not merely of a few men’s and women’s lives but of history itself. Yet exactly at this point the irony intrudes. Just when the Western inventions of capitalism, democracy and modernity reign over or are aspired to throughout the world… just now the church is informed that its sponsorship is no longer needed or wanted.”[4]

Some respond to this change by reducing Christianity to a core of social action and/or therapy, while sentimentally hanging on to some Christian language and practice. This response, which Clapp calls sentimental capitulation, ultimately admits that “in this modern world the church has nothing distinctive to offer or to be.”[5] Others respond with a strategy of retrenchment, trying to gain political power or a reputation for relevance in order to return to the “good old days” when Canada was “Christian” and we as the church had a respected place!

Is the displacement of the Church in western society bad news? Many say so. But doesn’t the dis-integration of church and society afford us a chance to recover the vision of ourselves as a peculiar people, called to a different way of life and given a different citizenship than those around us? In their book Resident Aliens, William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas say that now “we have an opportunity to discover what has and always is the case – that the church, as those called out by God, embodies a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know… We are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.”[6] Bad news? I don’t think so.
Any thoughts? Leave a comment!

[1] Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 25.
[2] Clapp, 23.
[3] J.H. Yoder, “The Otherness of the Church” in The Royal Priesthood, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p 53-64, as quoted in Clapp, 28.
[4] Clapp, 17.
[5] Clapp, 19.
[6] Stanley Hauerwas, William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 17-18, italics mine.