Can There Be Christianity Without Church?

Twenty-seven years ago an essay by Paul Hiebert entitled “Conversion, Culture, and Cognitive Categories” Appeared in the October (1978) issue of the short-lived Gospel in Context: A Dialogue on Contextualization. To conservative missiologists, who had long struggled to articulate an evangelical soteriology that would more adequately reflect both the mercy and the severity of God, Hiebert’s article was groundbreaking. It began with the hypothetical case of Papayya, an Indian peasant returning to his village after a grueling day of farming. Joining a small crowd of curiosity seekers, he hears a stranger tell of a new god who appeared on earth in the form of Jesus. Before going to his house for supper, Papayya publicly declares his belief in this new god, little comprehending either the content or the implications of his newfound faith. He knows that among the millions of gods in the Hindu pantheon, some repeatedly visit earth in one form or another, while this new god came to earth only once. Although Jesus is the Son of his heavenly Father, nothing is said about his celestial Mother. It is all very confusing, as matters pertaining to gods tend to be. The stranger departs from the village, never to be seen again. What difference does or should Papayya’s newfound faith make in his life? Who can teach him? Should he still go to the Hindu temple to pray to this new god? “Can Papayya become a Christian after hearing the Gospel only once?” Hiebert asks. “To this we can only say yes. To say that a person must be educated, have extensive knowledge of the Bible, or live a near perfect life would mean that the Good News is only for an elite few in the world” (p. 24).

Tim Tennent’s lead article in this issue poses this question in a slightly different form: Can there be authentic Christianity without a gathered church? Answers to this question hinge on what we mean by “church” and “Christian.” For two thousand years these deceptively simple terms have defied consensus, as global estimates of 37,000 Christian denominations and nearly300 confessional councils worldwide attest.

Reading the articles in this issue, one is struck by our uncanny human penchant for getting things wrong and then making sure they stay that way. Christianity in its most visible and impressively organized forms has steadily resisted those persons and practices most integral to its spiritual renewal and, hence, survival. These same articles, however, remind us that the viability of God’s kingdom is not at the mercy of organized religion, that inevitably, if slowly and imperceptibly, the living Seed produces a surprisingly bountiful and variegated harvest.

Take the indigenous resurgence in Latin America, for example—the theme of Edward Cleary’s article. Routinely and rightly criticized for often being little more than the religious front for Christendom’s brutal “guns, germs, and steel” conquest, missionaries at the same time unwittingly sowed the seeds of cultural survival, preservation, and renewal that have only recently begun to blossom after a 500-year incubation.

Linda Benson, whose scholarly intent was to discover the process of political change in China after 1912, instead found herself drawn into the lives of three extraordinary “missionaries with attitude,” whose practices elicited the censure of ecclesiastical purists of their day. Evangeline and Francesca French, with Alice Mildred Cable, who between them served more than 100years as missionaries in China, left scarcely any visible traces of their work—few, if any, converts, and no churches. Yet, given kingdom germination patterns, to call their endeavors fruitless would be premature. In their willingness to venture beyond the comforting confines and dictates of establishment religion, they followed in the train of John Amos Comenius and Anthony Norris Groves, whose stories also appear in the pages that follow.

Disillusioned with the establishment church’s predilection for resisting and undermining missionary efforts in India, Groves advocated a mission modus operandi that focused, in his view, on the Good News rather than on the extension or preservation of proprietary religious domains. Highly critical of prevailing mission theory and practice, he had “little interest in buildings, services, finances, organization, training, or ceremony.” Convinced that the Sermon on the Mount was the defining charter of God’s reign, Groves held that the true church was composed of individual believers “seeking to please Christ and encouraging others to do the same.” Significant indigenous movements initiated by leaders such as Watchman Nee and Sadhu Sundhar Singh are traceable to the influence of Groves’s ideas.

Comenius, 200 years earlier, lived out his life in the viciously partisan world of parochial European Christendom. Despite this fog that all but swallowed up mission, he proclaimed the universality of the Gospel. God’s kingdom, he taught, would come through the faithful and sustained witness—in preaching, reasoning, educating, translating, and, if need be, suffering—of apostolic preachers (missionaries). The kernel of his life and vision, producing little more than controversy by the time he died in 1670, was integral to the Moravian mission thrust, which formed the basis of the modern Protestant missionary movement, without which contemporary world Christianity is unimaginable.

Jesus warned his disciples that they (like most of us) tended to look in all the wrong places for the kingdom of God. It is worth pondering that Christ is more likely to be found outside than inside the wealthy, smugly self-sufficient Laodicean church (Rev.3:14–22) and its contemporary analogues. Will we one day discover that, for “churchless Christians” in India, Hindu temples were simply places of incubation, just as synagogues incubated our Lord’s earliest followers before finally ejecting them as “Christians”? And so we return to the question: can there be Christianity without church? Perhaps the question should be reframed: Is the true church—the kingdom—always visible, always recognizable, to those who operate within the Christian religious establishment? This issue of the IBMR points to an answer consistent with our Lord’s promise that “where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matt. 18:20 NIV).

Contents 

171 The Challenge of Churchless Christianity: An Evangelical Assessment
Timothy C. Tennent

177 Missionaries and the Indigenous Resurgence in Latin America
Edward Cleary, O.P.

178 Samuel Zwemer’s Theological Judgments
Gordon Nickel

183 Missionaries with Attitude: A Women’s Mission in Northwestern China
Linda Benson

188 Researching World Christianity: Doctoral Dissertations on Mission Since 1900
Eric Friede and Paul F. Stuehrenberg

190 “Come Holy Spirit, Heal and Reconcile”: An Evangelical Evaluation of the CWME Mission Conference in Athens, May 9–16, 2005
Tormod Engelsviken

192 A Letter from Athens to the Christian Churches, Networks, and Communities

194 My Pilgrimage in Mission
Charles C. West

198 The Legacy of Anthony Norris Groves
Robert Bernard Dann

204 The Legacy of John Amos Comenius
Mike W. Stroope

206 Noteworthy

209 Book Reviews

218 Dissertation Notices

219 Index (2005)

224 Book Notes