I ain’t no good at English. I’m doin’ much better now that I have been writin’ fur some time. Maybe it was because I grew up in Appalachia. Maybe it was because I took advanced English in high school simply because the courses dealt more with literature and less with English. I think I was a doctoral student before I knew the difference between an adverb and an adjective.
So, who I am to write about adjectives? Well, I did read about them once….
In this post, I want to address a very common matter, particularly among the churches in North America. We are people who like our adjectives when it comes to describing the church. We have Baptist churches, Methodist churches, and Pentecostal churches when it comes to our denominations. We even have “Non-denominational” churches to describe who is not officially connected to a denomination.
Now before I continue on with you assuming that I am opposed to adjectives, I must add that such is not completely the case. Personally, I am very proud to be a fourth generation Baptist of the Southern tribe.
Historically, we added adjectives to the Church to define where a particular church stood theologically. I am thankful that we make a distinction between Catholic and Protestant and Nazarene and Presbyterian. While I am not pleased with the acrimony and fall-out that occurred many times throughout history, resulting in the multitude of theological adjectives we now have, I am thankful that many of us today, while recognizing our differences, are not laboring to slash each other’s throats, but laboring to advance the gospel.
Of course, such theological adjectives are an historical development, and a long way from simply the adjectives of “Jewish” church or “Gentile” church.
But now, we do have adjectives such as “Russian,” “South Asian Indian,” and “Nepali” that clearly delineate the ethnic and language characteristics of these churches. Again, I’m thankful for this. If I accidentally walked into the meeting of a Chinese church on Sunday morning expecting to hear my language, I would be in for a surprise. My Chinese is not very good. I can’t even correctly pronounce “General Tso’s Chicken”.
But where will the adjectives end? Now, while I’m comfortable with theological and ethnic adjectives, I become more concerned with a new type of adjectival category that is now commonplace.
In North America today, we have now moved beyond classic distinctions of Protestant and Catholic, denominational, and ethnic distinctions, to what I’ll describe as distinctions in structure and flavor. While some of these may communicate significant theological distinctions, most do not. For example, on a regular basis, we now use the following adjectives to describe the local church: house, organic, simple, cell, multi-site, mega, traditional, conventional, postmodern, emergent, multi-housing, cowboy, biker, seeker, seeker-sensitive, hip-hop, college, multi-ethnic, and the list goes on and on.
As a missiologist, I understand the benefit of such adjectives. I use them all the time. If we know what the ideal cell church “looks” like, we can better understand what someone communicates when they say, “I am a member of a cell church.” For those of you who follow my blog know that my previous two posts were about my book on house churches. While there are limitations, clearly the use of “house” in the title communicated something specific about the churches in the book. If you receive my tweets, you know that I just taught a course on models of church planting. During this course, my students had the opportunity to observe and evaluate different expressions of the church from theological and missiological perspectives.
I share this information to say that I recognize the value of the structural and flavor adjectives.
But my concern lies in three areas.
First, at what point does the use of adjectives become an activity in absurdity? Will there come a day when we speak of “Baptist, post-modern, seeker-sensitive, gen-X, cowboy, house churches”? How’s that for your business card?
Second, and related to the first, at what point do our adjectives hinder the dissemination of the gospel and the growth of the church by directly teaching the church who we are and who we are attempting to reach, while indirectly educating the church on who we are probably not going to reach, “so we should not bother with them anyway”? Do we teach our Japanese churches that they are just as responsible for reaching African-Americans as the African-American churches? Do we teach our cowboy churches that they are to evangelize and plant churches among the hip-hop subcultures?
Finally, regardless of the adjective used, we must always be faithful to the biblical prescription for all that is necessary for a church to be a healthy church. Whether the church meets under a banyan tree or in a multi-million dollar facility is not the point. The timbre of the music is secondary in nature. The denominational or non-denominational stance takes a back seat to what Jesus requires of His church. The structure, ethnic composition, and whether or not the members ride Harley’s or horses are irrelevant here.
While contextualization factors matter, missionaries must know the biblical necessities for a local church to exist. They must know the biblical characteristics of healthy churches so that they can instill within the D.N.A. of those newly planted churches a vision and teaching for what our Lord expects.
Our biblical ecclesiology must come from the Scriptures and not from our missiology.
In a day when many individuals and groups have gone soft on the doctrine of ecclesiology, we must make sure we remain faithful to the biblical parameters. The good news is that Jesus knows best for His church. He has told church planters what is expected. The borders He has established for healthy churches are wide enough to allow for much flexibility and diversity.
So, while we continue to have adjectives here, remember there is coming a day when He will wipe away every tear…and every adjective.