Issue 1.1 | January 2018
In this Article: the Church's quest for success, the humiliation to come, and the grace that covers all.
There is no shortage, today, of ambitious Christianity. Whether it has to do with the evangelization of cultures or the eradication of evils, the transformation of sectors or the renewal of the church, we are all caught up in the desire to see great things happen for God. We are aflame with visions of a better world tomorrow. Much of this, though not all, is birthed by God’s Spirit at work in us.
There is a dilemma, however. For both as individual believers and as churches, we encounter overwhelming odds in our pursuit of God’s commands — not least the frustrating and inconvenient obstacle of our own incompetence and weakness.
Who does not desire success, especially in matters of God’s Kingdom? I do. Our performance reviews of today’s Church, conducted in foyers, coffee shops and Facebook, reveal our clear conviction that we wish the world to be impressed by Christ and his people.
Faced by the dilemma of our weakness, this desire for success also opens us up to a peril: the peril of an affair with power. We long for power: the power to accomplish great things. With this power we hope to resolve our incompetence, eliminate our weakness. To put it more accurately, our great and desperate wish is to not fail.
The Heresy of Addition
The hunger for power leads to a heresy that has plagued the Church throughout its entire history, a heresy that deceives easily because it perverts nothing directly. It is the heresy of addition.
In our fleshliness we crave more than Christ Himself and his saving work. To our flesh, Christ seems inadequate. He rarely seems to come through in the powerful way we’d hoped for, and so we add and add and add to him: insights, techniques, models, processes. We obsess over correct belief or correct praxis — though rarely both. We are caught up in a frenzy of addiction to addition. What we add is often good, in and of itself, found as it is in God’s creation and in God’s instruction.
What we add comes from every sphere of human experience and learning, in a diversity of forms from across the theological spectrum of churches. It might be a mission strategy or a prayer strategy or a spiritual warfare strategy that must be practised before we will know success in our endeavours as a Church. It might be a trend in worship or a liturgical format. It might be mega or satellite or simple. It might be the requirement that we receive further experiences of his Spirit before we will truly know “victory”. As good things from Christ take on salvific quality, they warp into the heresy of addition to Christ.
We run the risk of preaching this heresy when we write How To books and we even risk it when the prophecies we give or receive become the preoccupation of our lives. Prophecies, after all, provide power as well, for they bring supernatural definition or knowledge where there was none before. Knowledge equals power, especially when we are faced with the chaos or, alternatively, the vague ambiguities, of life. When such things ultimately serve to distract our attention from Christ himself as the centre and totality of individual and collective discipleship, they become this heresy.
Jesus is Lord. This is the Good News we have received with great joy. We add to it because to us it is, in fact, not good enough: we are creatures who crave control. The heresy of addition is basic to our existence, because it taps into our flesh’s desire to have a hand in everything. We want our salvation by works, whenever at all possible. The sin of Adam and Eve still flows in our natural blood — that desire to ultimately retain control and be our own god, even to the extent that we (not Christ in us) achieve new heights of faithfulness; that we (not Christ in us) deal effectively with our sin and weaknesses; that we (not Christ in us) draw ourselves nearer to favour with God.
This is a terrible place to be, for this affair with power is in truth an affair with ourselves. It is, as Martin Luther put it, to have our hearts turned in on themselves. This is a terrible state to be in, for in our very spirituality we are no less worldly than the world around us. To love oneself first is no less than to align with all in the world that is against God. James’ words to the churches of his day are also to us: “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” (4:4)
Hope for Heretics
There is, however, a hope, and it lies in a basic problem with which we are constantly faced: our affair with power is always confounded by failure. Has the Church ever known a time of overwhelming or consistent success? No, it never has. Not even the New Testament (NT) churches, to which we hark back so fondly, knew this kind of success. The NT writings show us various groups of believers from across the Roman Empire whose performance of the Christian life was generally incompetent and tarnished by routine failure. We are the same. But in our failure, perhaps, lies the clue to our salvation from ourselves.
The simple and only truly significant feature of the Church is that the grace of Jesus Christ is our salvation in regard to every feature of our existence as individuals and as a community.
Jesus’ grace takes its shape and reveals itself solely in the context of our failure. Failure, it must be said, will stay with the Church until the day Christ comes in his final act of love to claim us, his bride. It will stay with us because failure is a manifestation of weakness, and we find, perhaps to our dismay, that it is only in our weakness that Christ’s power is made perfect (2 Corinthians 12:9). There is no other place in which Christ’s power is made perfect. He chooses only folly for his path (1 Corinthians 1:18-29).
How frustrating! We think our frustration is an expression of spiritual zeal, but mostly it lies with the humiliation that we experience as a result of failure. Failure rankles. It is a bitter taste that clings to the spirit’s tongue, an agitation that permeates one’s entire being. It brings an unresolvable unrest. Too often we are appalled only because we are embarrassed. And when the Church embarrasses itself before the watching world, we often take out our frustrations upon one another, levelling criticism upon criticism at “the Church”: of which, we seem to forget, we are a part. In our criticisms of one another we reveal our idols, those cherished additions to the Good News about Jesus — if the Church “just did” such and such, we would be the successful people we are supposed to be and the world would be wowed by us.
It is sad we insist on this way of thinking, because history shows us very few occasions where the world has been wowed by the Church. Not only has the Church practised appalling behaviour at times, but in both our weaknesses and our convictions we generally invite the derision of the world. The world crucified Jesus and for the same reasons the world will want to crucify the Church.
There is, however, both grace and testimony in this humiliation we experience.
Grace
With regards to grace, humiliation places us in a position whereby our only source of genuine relief is the generous grace of Jesus Christ. The mature believer can accept humiliation, knowing that Christ’s work of salvation is his or her sole qualification for acceptance (and success) in the spiritual realm. In this way, we are both victims and beneficiaries of grace. On the one hand, Jesus’ grace puts to death my flesh’s desire to be its own god and saviour. This is itself a gift. On the other hand, I receive the gift of forgiveness that accounts for all sin and failure in my life. So it is Jesus’ grace extended to me and dwelling in me by the Holy Spirit, not my own spiritual successfulness, that gives me any standing in the Church or as his representative in this world. We cannot possibly stand on our spiritual successes. We stand only because Jesus’ grace lifts each of us by the chin and bestows upon us, via mercy and love, a dignity we never deserved. It is the same for us as a Church. We have no great standing before the world. The only valuable possession within the Church is grace and its blessings — “treasures in jars of clay”. (2 Corinthians 4:7)
Testimony
Failure is precisely the point at which Christ was revealed to the world. The greatest moment of failure the world ever witnessed was when death claimed Christ — or so it seemed. We know, however, that this very point at which God seemed to be vulnerable was the point at which he won our greatest victory for us, making a “public spectacle” of, and “disarming”, the principalities and powers who thought they held the power of death (Colossians 2:15).
And so it is that our failure, the weakness it evidences and the humiliation that results are also our testimony. Do we think we contribute anything to our positive image, as the children of God, to the world? Not a thing! No, it is only the redeeming, merciful presence of Christ within us, and only ever will be, that reveals to the world that Christ’s power vanquishes failure and death. To more fully quote Paul, “we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God, and not from us”.
Cheer up Church, you’re worse off than you think.
— Charlie Peacock
The world, when it is honest with itself, knows that it too is riddled by failure. When the Church’s testimony is simply the success of its good works, the world still does not see Christ. Instead, it finds itself presented with an apparently arrogant, moralistic organisation whose members are an alien species for whom weakness is foreign.
If we are honest with ourselves, however, it is obvious that weakness is not at all foreign to the Church. In fact, as Charlie Peacock penned in a song: “Cheer up Church, you’re worse off than you think.” We have no concept of the profound depths to which Christ’s grace must take account of our weaknesses and failures. The failures we are aware of and frustrated with are only the surface of the deep ocean of our sinfulness. When we grasp this reality, we can perhaps grasp how totally our identity as believers and as a believing community is rooted in and shaped by Christ’s grace.
The calling of the Church is not to success: we are called to submission, and God our Father will be our success. We are not called to be powerful: we are called to be people of prayer, and the Spirit himself will be our power. We are not called to be perfect: we are called to be faithful, and Christ Himself will be our righteousness.
We assume our testimony is valuable only when it is characterised by spiritual competence and success. This is our testimony, however: that before it even fixes us, Jesus’ grace nullifies the power of failure. Who is humiliated then? Only the devil, for whom failure is his greatest tool.
Note: this post and the forthcoming post are a revised version of an article I first wrote in the December 1999 issue of Theologically Speaking, a publication of African Enterprise South Africa.
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