Forget about "rethinking the Church"

As the 21st century Church becomes increasingly unchurched because of a kind of preaching that makes legalists of saints and consumers [shoppers] of the lost, [thanks Pastor Ben for your comment on Sunday that if we want to quench the Spirit, just turn the Bible into a self-help manual rather than a God-glorifying book that changes lives by putting on display with all of its implications the staggering beauty of the person and work of Christ] perhaps we need to forget about rethinking the Church since it wasn't our idea in the first place. The Church is "the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of truth" [I Timothy 3.15]. As the note on this verse in the 1599 Geneva Bible puts it, "the Church is the preserver of truth, but not the mother." What the Church is is a "body" of brothers and sisters who are saved by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ "whereby He took our sin, bore God's judgment in our place, and now clothes us in His righteousness."

At the end of his book, The Courage to Be Protestant [2008], David Wells helps us see the folly of rethinking the visible [those we see saved and lost in our pews or "chairs"] Church:

"Everything about the church must be [is being] rethought! We must rethink how it becomes successful! We must rethink it all because this is what businesses have to do. Their products are all the time dying as new niches and needs arise. So it is in the church! Rethink or die! For the multitude of pragmatists who are leading churches in America today . . . the church is nothing but its performance. There is nothing to be said about the church that cannot be reduced to how it is doing, and that is a matter for constant inventories, poll taking, daily calculations and strategizing. I beg to differ . . . The church is not our creation. It is not a business. The church, in fact, was never our idea in the first place. No, it is not the church we need to rethink. Rather, it is our thoughts about the church that need to be rethought. It's the church's faithfulness that needs to be reexamined. It is its faithfulness to who it is in Christ, its faithfulness in living out its life in the world, that should be occupying us. The church, after all, is not under our management but under God's sovereign care, and what he sees as health is very often different from what we imagine its health to be . . . God has given us the blueprint for its life in Scripture. What we need to do, then, first and foremost, is to think God's thoughts after him, think about the church in a way that replicates his thoughts about it" [pp. 222-223].