In July-August 1944, while in Tegel prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer outlined a proposal for a book, and made the comment that ‘the air is not quite fresh, even in the Confessing Church.’ Yet in 1933 as the Confessing Church had been forced to split from the German Christians who supported Hitler, Bonhoeffer had spoken out strongly: ‘He who deliberately separates himself from the Confessing Church in Germany, separates himself from salvation.’ What had happened in those ten years? The Confessing Church had fought an often brave battle against Nazi thuggery and totalitarianism, and sought to protect its own schools, journals, seminary, confessions, youth work (in competition with the compulsory Hitler Youth), and the insidious Aryan paragraph (which excluded Jews in particular from the public service, and which Nazis wanted applied to the Church, since about thirty of Germany’s 18,000 Protestant pastors had Jewish ancestry). Part of Bonhoeffer’s criticism was that the Church had tried to defend itself against Nazism, but had hesitated to be so public about defending the Jews.
There are today, as always, pressures on the evangelical Church to keep in touch with modern society, to keep doors open, to be relevant, and to maintain what it calls a gospel witness, when all along there is a hidden assumption that somehow God cannot do without us. The evangelical Church often seeks to confront the world only to the point that it protects itself as a functioning body. Virtually anything can be thrown overboard provided we can utter, for the most part behind closed doors, that Christ died for sinners and rose again the third day (1 Cor.15:3-4). It is easy to forget that the Pharisees told Jesus to rebuke His disciples on Palm Sunday for proclaiming: ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’ Jesus’ reply was ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out’ (Luke 19:38-40). God will have His way, regardless of what we do.
We need to do better than simply have the reputation for being evangelical. The church at Sardis was rebuked by its risen Lord: ‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead’ (Rev.3:1). The church was apparently a hive of some kind of activity because it must have gained its reputation from somewhere. What might it have had? Numbers? An impressive choir, a band, fetes, committees, a gymnastics club, power point presentations, a pastor fulfilling many worthy civic duties? Somehow it looked alive, but it was actually spiritually dead.
Appearance and reality are not always identical; it is possible to have a form of godliness but deny its power (2 Tim.3:5). As Augustine put it: ‘Food in dreams is exactly like real food, yet it does not sustain us; for we are only dreaming.’ Francis Schaeffer once asked: ‘What if the Holy Spirit were removed from the modern Church? What would happen?’ He answered his own question by saying that most of the Church would carry on as it had before. That was a trenchant way of saying that much of what the modern Church is doing has little to do with the Holy Spirit. There would still be worship services, Assemblies, and activities – but no real spiritual life. There can be busyness, friendliness, and something to occupy every waking moment, but that does not prove that the Spirit has wrought regeneration in the hearts of His people.
I can remember hearing one visiting evangelical expert on church growth who said something like: ‘The first thing for the church to do is to put a second person on the payroll, even if it only that you employ the pastor as a part-time janitor. That gives the appearance of growth. It works in the business world.’ That was enough to show that he had no idea at all. We are not here on earth to play church, to appear spiritual, to puff ourselves up and win the world’s applause.
To be evangelical is more than holding in some way to that which is of first importance – the death and resurrection of Christ. God has revealed more than that; there is such a thing as ‘the whole counsel of God’ (Acts 20:27). Perfection is denied us this side of glory, but it is sadly possible to maintain an outward evangelical exterior while we are deftly avoiding God’s more uncomfortable claims on His people. In Jeremiah’s day God’s covenant people thought that it was enough to chant: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord’ (Jer.7:4). But it was not.
Peter Barnes