Recovering a Primitive Ecclesiology
Much has been said about Christianity in the West and the need for the Church to rethink its approach, so I won’t belabor the point here. But I will say this: if the studies are correct and our current models of church will only reach about 20% of a given city at best, we must ask how we can reach the other 80%. We need a definition of church that allows us to go anywhere and reach anyone, with possibilities as expansive as the mission of God it’s called to participate in.
What we’ve tried to do as the UNDERGROUND is get to a primitive ecclesiology, a definition of the church at its essence. As we looked at Scripture, we became convinced that the church at its core was the intersection of worship, community, and mission organized for a purpose. Worship being the exaltation of Jesus as Lord and our lives as living sacrifices. Community being a spiritual family organized around a purpose, accountable to one another. Mission being the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel to the lost and the poor. But even as we look at the Greek word ecclesia, we understand this to be civic body called together for a particular purpose. In that vein, the church can’t exist for itself. It must be organized around a particular call. What if the church was nothing or less than worshipping communities on mission for a certain purpose?
To be clear, attempts at primitive ecclesiology weren’t for the sake of mobilization. We wanted the church. It just so happened that in pursuing the latter we stumbled on something that had the potential to accomplish the former. Because this definition of church speaks nothing to form or method, the church can take shape in a variety of ways. It can look like a mentoring program for middle school black girls helping them grow in their identity in Christ. It can look like men in recovery journeying toward Jesus. It can look like dinner and bible study with non-Christian friends. Each of these communities must figure out a way to be the church to the people to whom they’ve been sent, and because it is God who does the calling, the possibilities are as endless as His creativity.
Because these “microchurches” understand themselves as small, they don’t try to reach everyone. Instead, they focus on a single group of people and, in so doing, become experts in reaching niche communities that would otherwise never darken the door of a traditional church. If these humble expressions of the church change the world, it’s not because they actively seek to as much as they aim to play their part. But when everyone plays their part, you get a glimpse of the subversive revolution Jesus inaugurated in his coming.
There’s a way in which we suffer a dearth of language when it comes to the church. We often associate churches with buildings and services, worship with singing, and community with friendship but what if none of those things are the whole truth? When you get to a primitive ecclesiology, each of these pieces can be reintroduced as tools, a means to an end rather than the end itself. Perhaps the church is not a building or a service but can benefit from both to the extent that we don’t conflate it with those things. In recovering a more primitive ecclesiology, the church can be more fluid, getting into the crevasses of any given city and meeting the other 80% where they’re at.
