I met Jerry on a Sunday afternoon in the oldest neighborhood in Fort Worth, TX. He and I had gathered with a small group for Sunday dinner at the home of Steve and Lindsay. Steve preached at a nearby congregation. He and his family of five practiced a ministry of presence in this racially and economically diverse neighborhood. After devouring Lindsay’s pot roast, we pushed back from their long wooden-plank table and shared stories.
Most of our tales had a common theme: church. Steve and I preached for churches. A married couple at the table were training with Pioneer Bible Translators so they could take the church and its Book to others. And Jerry and his wife taught the junior-high students at their church.
We listened while Jerry discussed his desire to share Jesus with his patients and bring them to church. As a cancer doctor, he intersected the storylines of peoples’ lives in some of their most challenging chapters. Jerry believed God had called him to not just treat their bodies, but their hearts and souls as well.
Still, he explained, he hadn’t been sure how to do this. He noticed another doctor who modeled one approach. This physician aggressively evangelized patients, sometimes explicitly telling them they were not going to live and were not going to heaven. Not only was the method ineffective, it was unethical. A visit from members of the medical board ended his pugnacious proselytizing.
Jerry decided on a more tender approach. He decided to tweak a conversation which he’s required to have with every patient. While taking a history, Jerry asks a list of questions commonly expected:
- “Tell me about your work, what you do…”
- “Tell me about your home life…”
- “Do you have any hobbies?”
- “Do you smoke?”
But Jerry also inserts one question not expected:
“And, where do you go to church?”
The question has opened the door to many spiritual conversations. Sometimes, one good question is the snowflake that starts an avalanche of conversation.
But to our surprise, Jerry reported that, without exception, every patient he’s queried in this way has responded with just one word: “Well…”
- That’s the answer you get in February when you ask someone “How are your New Year’s resolutions going?”
- It’s the answer you get when you ask a friend two months into a diet, “How’s the diet going?”
- It’s the answer I frequently get when I ask my son on Sunday night, “Is all your homework done?”
Well…
Even those patients who finally revealed that they actually did attend church, at least sometimes, began their answer with this qualifying word: Well… It was as if their relationship with church was complicated, not cut-and-dry. A complex concoction as noxious as it was nourishing. Perhaps a bit like the radiation or chemo they might soon face–something that would save them if it didn’t kill them first.
Well…
Worse, a full fifty percent of Jerry’s patients go on to tell him they don’t attend church anywhere. Diagnosed with cancer, at least some of them stand on the edge of the valley of the shadow of death, and they have no church home. No circle of saints. No friends of faith. Forget for a moment anything their unchurched status says about their hereafter. Think about what it says regarding their here-and-now. One out of two face difficult days without the support found in a healthy church.
There’s nothing scientific about Jerry’s anecdote. But it does illustrate the up-and-down nature of the relationship many today have with the church and her faith. It’s increasingly common to find people who, at best, offer a qualified “Well…” and, at worst, have no connection at all. More and more, those we live near, work with, or compete against are uncertain or unfavorable toward the church and her faith.
Yet while people are signing off of congregational membership rolls, they are signing up for something we might call “kingdom work.” With great passion teens, young adults and others participate in the drilling of water wells, the feeding of the homeless, the adopting of orphans and the mentoring of at-risk-youth. Sanctuaries are emptying. Service teams are overflowing. All in the name of “kingdom work.”
These popular acts of social justice have become so widespread that “kingdom,” according to author Scot McKnight, now means this:
- Good deeds
- done by good people (Christian or not)
- in the public sector
- for the common good. (p. 4)
McKnight, author and professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, proposes that, increasingly, the spiritual energies of Americans are invested in good deeds out in the world with no connection to any type of Christian congregation. Desiring to be “kingdom people” engaged in “kingdom work,” the shrinking lines of people standing at the doors of the parish have been replaced by growing lines waiting at the doors of the non-profit.
Yet, McKnight strenuously objects “you can’t be kingdom people without being church people” (p. 79), and “there is no kingdom now outside the church” (p. 87) and “there is no kingdom mission that is not church mission” (p. 96). Anyone who hungers to engage in kingdom work must participate in that work through a relationship with the church. The church is the only expression of God’s kingdom in the present.
McKnight plods through the academic arguments and textual nuances which require this stance. Those seeking an in-depth study of “church” and “kingdom” will walk away stuffed from the book’s ample provisions. The book mines so many levels of “church” and “kingdom” that it reads like three or four books pressed into one.
In the end, however, the book suceeds in making a case for the importance of the church. Though the church does not yet fully express the reign of God where justice, peace and freedom flow freely, it is nontheless growing in that direction. The church is God’s reign “inaugurated but not fully consummated” (pg. 157). The church remains the one sure place where God’s redemptive rule is breaking into people’s lives, and, through them, into the world. God “creates both a spiritual and a social redemption in the locus of the church, and the church’s people spill over in love and holiness and justice and peace into the community” (pg. 154). That is, if kingdom work is happening any where, it’s happening in and through the church.
You may not buy all of McKnight’s arguments. The Restoration Movement, in fact, experienced many of the negative consequences that can happen when “kingdom” and “church” are too closely aligned (e.g., sectarianism). Many within Churches of Christ may struggle against McKnight’s attempt to bring these two poles back together. But even if you don’t buy in, you’ll walk away with a far greater appreciation for what the church is in the present and what it will ultimately become in the future. Whether or not “kingdom work” is taking place outside the church, it is clearly taking place in and through the church in ways that are unparalleled. And that should be enough to turn any “Well…” into a “I can’t wait to tell you!”
Scot McKnight
Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church
Brazos Press, 2014
289 Pages
ISBN 978-1-58743-360-3
