If You Don’t Like the Church…Here’s Good News

By Neil Earle

With the Stanley Cup series over, I was scanning my TV dial Saturday night and dropped in on the American Film Institute’s achievement award for Jane Fonda.

Jane Fonda?

Some eyes are rolling now, I admit, and on a couple of counts. First of all, it’s the Hollywood Crowd celebrating themselves again, some will say. Secondly, Jane was praised as a “devout Christian.”

Hmmm. The Jane Fonda?

To answer Number One – I live in LA so someone has to cover the movie beat. I know about the Hollywood Prayer Network, for example, which offers a prayer-fellowship lifeline giving support to some of the 3000 Christians who work in “the industry” – carpenters, unit producers, script writers, make-up staff, and even actors such as Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg. Mark was written up in Parade magazine as going to mass and then coming home to pick up his family for 11AM church.

So we need to encourage the church-goers out here to carry on. You have more friends than you think.

A Non-Traditional Believer

Jane Fonda as Christian was a pleasant shocker for me but – sure enough – the Web has covered her conversion to Christianity after her marriage ended to Ted Turner. Of course Ms Fonda seems to be Christian in her own way. As we might expect. Then too, many will never forgive her for her role as Hanoi Jane in the seething atmosphere of the Vietnam Era (1965-1973). But still, other vets have extended forgiveness to her and she herself has apologized for this episode in her life. So, the beat goes on.

What struck me about her Christian-themed blog was the fact that she disagreed with the 325 AD church council decision defining God as a Trinity of three personages contained within the one God essence (three hypostases in one divine ousia to be more technical).

Ms Fonda’s beef was on feminist terms – there’s no way three men back there in a politically triggered convention could have arrived at the right decision on God.

Of course we could expect all this because this swerve from traditional Christian norms is not uncommon today. Millions and millions don’t like the church even though the church, as a pastor friend tells me slyly, was Jesus idea (Matthew 16:18). Even Dan Kimball in defending church-going to the “emergent” generation likens visiting church as a trip to the dentist – we need to know what’s happening to us, good or bad (They Like Jesus But Not The Church, page 258).

A Painful Journey

It just so happened that our church, Grace Communion International, back when it was known as the Worldwide Church of God, paid a huge price in morale, money and members when it sharpened its focus about what God has called it to do in the world. It was mentally and spiritually excruciating to see 80-90% of our people leave over such issues as our fervently adopting the Trinity, for example. We were able to keep our equilibrium by focusing once again on the fact that, for any part of the Body of Christ, the Mission is not ours, but His.

The good news here today is that the purpose of the church is bigger than the church. We are a part – a strategic part – of what God is doing in this world but there are priorities we need to remember.

The insightful German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, whom I interviewed in 1994 and who spent his life trying to nurse has fellow-countrymen back to spiritual health after the devastation of World War two, says this: “The Church participates in the creative mission of the Spirit…It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill, it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the Church, creating a church as it goes on its way.”

Now I like this. It puts the emphasis where it should be – back on God not on us!! It is not our task to frighten or pester people into conversion but to radiate with the Spirit’s help the never-failing joy and courage of the One who said, “I am come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Jesus promised a life of challenge and struggle but a life of perpetual renewal available in the Spirit (2 Timothy 1:6).

The church at its best is a recipient of what God has had on his mind for all eternity, the task of adoption of myriads of people into the divine family and bringing “many sons to glory” (Hebrews 2:10). God the Father effects all this in a way which flows out of His very nature. Twenty-two years ago the Great Triune God opened our eyes to see that He exists in perfect, mutual, communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14).

One of our outstanding youth leaders is Jeb Egbert who explains this in terms of family relationships. He expounds this all-embracing, initiating love of the Father as the strongest force in the universe, the very love that binds Father, Son and Holy Spirit in perfect unity and is now shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:1-5). The Spirit is that powerful Agent of the Godhead that illuminates the Father’s love for the Son to all people – we thus come to God through the sovereign over-ruling activity of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit teaches and reveals – it reveals to us the responsive and reciprocal love between the Father and the Son in eternity (John 14:26), a love that can be ours, and one we show to the world in good works.

If you are one of those who see the church not living up to all that across time and in your neighborhood or family, here’s more good news: You are right. The Church has much to answer for in the past and the present and our only hope is the same hope offered to all human beings, that our Judge is also a Merciful and Faithful High Priest – Jesus Christ, head of the church and Savior of the world (Hebrews 2:17).

Jesus is not free-floating entity that anyone can appropriate. He is connected to his Body, “the Church of God which He purchased with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). This doesn’t excuse our sins and excesses and horrible lassitude but it does give us a chance – at least a chance – to reflect the same godly mercy and forgiveness to others, including Hollywood celebrities.

The Three in What?

And speaking of the Trinity here’s more good news: Many inside the church perfectly understand the difficulty that people have with grasping a concept as huge as the Three in One. Frankly only God could have revealed this to us. As the Christian defender C.S. Lewis said, if we were simply making up a theory of God then of course we could simplify it. That’s what people have done all across history, it seems. But if we’re talking about the True God, the Creator of us all, the One outside every thought system we have ever come up with, then of course we’d have to sweat and strain mentally and spiritually to get a glimpse of His almost unfathomable greatness.

We are like ants trying to figure out what a human being is – it isn’t easy. And I should say (politely, I hope) it is difficult enough without injecting late modern ideas into the equation such as feminism.

It’s like this. Beginning in 325 AD, Christian thinkers began to connect the clues across Scripture about the dynamics of the mutually reinforcing and totally unselfish life within the Godhead. In general terms, loving concern seems to be the special characteristic of the Father (John 14:23; John 3:16). The Son, beloved and begotten by the Father in eternity before all time, is the perfect expression of the Father’s care and concern. He is called the express image of the Father in Hebrews 1:1-3 – so much so that to worship the Son is to worship the Father (John 5:23).

Flowing out of all this is more good news. The human Jesus, who came to show us how to live more abundantly, was the First to be perfected in this process of receiving the Holy Spirit at baptism and so walking worthy of the Lord (healing, helping, forgiving) as to be glorified as Head above all. That is the pattern we who are now led by the Spirit are supposedly following into through the work of the Holy Spirit inside us (Romans 8:17).

The Church on Mission

This is the greatness of the Trinity teaching. It helps clarify our destiny. Rightly understood, it is divine short-hand for the purposes of God. All this is accomplished through the energizing mission of the Holy Spirit, and not by us (Hebrew 9:14; Romans 1:4). The Son and the Father send forth the Spirit to call men and women and children to faith in Christ, to awaken them to their glorious purpose (Acts 4:33). Jesus the Forerunner of our salvation has gone before us as our older brother and his inheritance will be shared with us (Revelation 3:21-23).

All of this is rooted and grounded in divine love, the “glue” that binds Father, Son and Spirit together in mutually interpenetrating love from all eternity. In the outspreading of that divine love we are adopted as God’s children (Ephesians 1:5). This is what the Church has been given to proclaim. So don’t give up on the church just yet—we’re only human after all. But – and here’s the key – we have a great Leader who is also a merciful High Priest who intercedes for us daily. Jesus, our ace in the hole people might say today. Thank God for that!