A few months ago I asked my brothers in a home group meeting something along these lines: “Does anyone think the church should look the way it does today? We have thousands of denominations, mainline churches, independent churches, gigantic megachurches, along with countless splinter groups and tiny, informal home group gatherings, all professing to be ‘the church.’ Could this exceedingly fragmented jumble of assemblies possibly be what Jesus had in mind when He said, ‘I will build My church’?” Various answers were suggested, though none that really satisfied any of us.
I’ve explored
that question more since, and have come up with a theory of the church to perhaps
help explain this staggering diversity, based on Christ’s parables of the
kingdom of God and the reasonable supposition that the church is a reflection of that kingdom. One parable
comes to mind in particular, because it seems to address the “visibility” of
the kingdom (how it looks):
Another
parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like mustard
seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all
the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a
tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (Matt.
13:31-32).
In the past
I had always read the parable of the mustard seed as a picture of visible
church growth: it starts small, yes, but pretty soon it’s a huge, sprawling
enterprise complete with monolithic buildings, a well-paid staff, huge crowds,
entertaining bands and a parade of celebrated guest speakers. On the other hand
I had always read the parable of the leaven which immediately follows as a
picture of invisible influence: what the church is doing “behind the scenes,”
so to speak. But of course if the essence of the church is its high-profile
programs, then what cannot be seen
hardly matters. At most, then, unseen activity is merely rehearsal for the big
show on Sunday. On that premise the kingdom as leaven is literally “upstaged”
by the kingdom as a giant, growing tree. So why did Jesus even bother with
telling the parable of the leaven, let alone tell it immediately after telling the
parable of the mustard seed/great tree, if it’s not really what the kingdom is
like?
These days
I’m more inclined to think that the parable of the growing tree serves to illustrate
the wild, unpredictable, uncontrollable growth of God’s work. Remember, it is Christ,
not men, who builds His church. Right away that means that the church almost
certainly won’t look like anything men would ever set out to build. Whereas men
would prefer an impressive, intimidating juggernaut towering over the rest of
humanity and destroying anything standing in its way (remember the Catholic
Church before the Reformation here), God in his hiddenness and humility would
probably not prefer anything of the sort. One way God could keep his church
from becoming too proud and daunting would be to inspire and arrange branching-off
events – i.e., church splits. Ugly and unspiritual as they often are, church
splits keep the church humble and accessible.
Naturally
this leads to the question of divisions. If disciples of Christ are known by
their love for one another (John 13:35), how can church splits be the will of
God? Well, I think firstly that splits can occur between sincere believers who
love God and love people – even one another. There’s no rule that says one
party in a split must be genuinely Christian and the other a fake. (Most
scholars agree that Paul and Barnabas were genuine apostles both before and
after the sharp disagreement that led to their parting of ways.) My somewhat
radical thesis is that God actually uses
divisions, to create a wildly diverse church consisting of untold worship
styles and organizational structures, so that there will be a place in the
church for everyone regardless of their personalities or backgrounds.
With all
that in mind, let’s reconsider Paul’s analogy of the body for the church. It is
“many parts, one body.” I’ve always read this to mean that each of the “parts” represents
an individual in the church. But it may be that the parts also speak of countless
denominations, congregations, independent splinter groups, house church networks,
seminaries and training centers, and the like. We should recall that a body grows as its cells divide and organs
begin to develop that are wholly unlike one another in both function and
appearance.
But back to the tree. Given that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches (John 15), it seems reasonable to suggest that even branches that never connect directly with one another are still connected to the vine -- or in the case of the great tree, the trunk. I propose, then, that as Christians we do our best to refrain from judging other movements and expressions of the body, and do what we can to build up the body and love one another where God has placed us.
