Beauty So Ancient and So New: 7 Part Series: Finale: The Manifesto: What We Are Actually Talking About

There is a hard truth that we need to discuss.

The word “church” has been used to cover so much ground. So many buildings, brands, movements, institutions, scandals, revivals, and slow declines.  “Church” has become almost semantically empty. When I say “the church,” I am aware that you may be picturing something you’ve been hurt by, something you’ve left, something you’re still in but barely, something you love and are watching die. I am picturing all of those things too.

What I am trying to talk about is something underneath all of that. Something that was there before the institution and will be there after it. Something the institution has sometimes carried faithfully and sometimes nearly smothered. The thing itself. The body. The community gathered around the risen Christ, animated by his Spirit, organized by his love, and accountable to his Kingdom and nothing else. The beautiful thing.

That is what we are talking about. And I want to make the case, as plainly as I can, that the future of that thing is not what most people think it is.

The Diagnosis

The church in the Western world is in institutional decline. This is not controversial and the numbers are not ambiguous. The generation coming up behind us is leaving in numbers that no amount of rebranding has slowed, and the responses to that departure have largely made things worse. We’ve given more production, more relevance-chasing, more attempts to make the church palatable to people who have concluded, not unreasonably, that it is simply the chaplaincy of a particular cultural and political tribe.

But here is what I want to say about that decline: it is not the death of the church. It may be the death of Christendom, which is a different thing, and which has been dying for longer than we have been paying attention.

Christendom is the arrangement (formalized by Constantine, developed through the medieval synthesis, assumed by most of Western Christianity until embarrassingly recently) in which the church and the surrounding culture are basically aligned. In which Christian values are more or less the default. In which the church has cultural privilege, social respectability, and at least informal political influence. In which being a Christian costs you very little and may in fact benefit you socially.

That arrangement is over. And its ending feels like catastrophe if you believed the arrangement was the point. But if you go back further, before Constantine, before the arrangement existed, you find a church that was not only surviving without cultural privilege but was, by most measures, more alive. More generative and responsive and more genuinely itself.

The pre-Nicene church did not have buildings, budgets, political access, or social respectability. It had the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. It had communities small enough to know each other. It had leaders recognizable by their willingness to suffer rather than their skill at managing. It had an expectation, not an odd hope, nor some theological proposition, but a living expectation, that the Spirit of God was present and active and doing things.

And it turned the world upside down.

The Retrieval

Thomas Oden spent the last decades of his life arguing that the way forward is behind us. He meant that the consensual orthodoxy of the first eight centuries (the faith hammered out at the councils, carried in the creeds, expounded by the fathers) is not a museum piece but a living inheritance. That the Nicene Creed is not a historical curiosity but the load-bearing wall. That Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, and Irenaeus (along with others) are not background figures but doctors. The men whose wisdom we desperately need and have largely stopped consulting.

He was right.

But retrieval without expectation becomes theological excavation. You can have all the right doctrine and a completely dead church. You can confess the full divinity of the Spirit on Sunday morning and functionally expect him to do nothing. “White washed tombs” comes to mind.

This is where the charismatic tradition, at its best and stripped of its pathologies, has something the retrieval movement needs. The expectation that God actually moves. The hunger for the Spirit to do what the Spirit does. To heal, gift, speak, and knit the body together in ways no organizational chart can replicate. The refusal to treat the Christian life as primarily an intellectual exercise in correct belief and to have it shelved on a daily basis only to pick it up on Sunday’s if it’s convenient.

The fathers themselves did not experience these things as opposites. Basil wrote the most rigorous Trinitarian theology of his era and built the first hospital in recorded history and expected the Spirit to move through his community. Irenaeus defended the apostolic faith against every form of Gnostic novelty and described healings in his own congregations without apparent embarrassment. The Didache gives you a structured liturgy and then says: let the prophet give thanks as long as he wishes. Again, both at the same time without tension.

The split between doctrinal seriousness and pneumatological expectation is not ancient wisdom. It is a modern wound and one we do not have to keep.

The Anarchism

I want to reclaim a word. Reappropriate it even, and I know its and uphill climb.

Anarchism, properly understood, is not chaos. It is the conviction that illegitimate authority: authority that exists to serve itself rather than those under its care, authority that consolidates power rather than distributing it, authority that demands lordship rather than offering service, should be refused. That the only authority worth following is the authority that looks like a basin and a towel. Even better, it looks like a cross.

The church, at its best, has always been anarchist in this sense. Its head is Christ. Its authority is cruciform and its leaders are servants before they are anything else, and the moment they stop being servants they have stopped being leaders in any sense the New Testament recognizes.

Remember, Jesus said it plainly: the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. (Mark 10:42-44) This is not a suggestion about leadership style. It is a description of an entirely different political order. One in which greatness runs in the opposite direction from every human instinct about power. It is subversive at its core.

The institutional church has spent two millennia finding sophisticated ways to ignore this. The celebrity pastor. The episcopal empire. The denominational machinery that exists primarily to perpetuate itself. The church growth movement that baptized the logic of the market and called it ministry. All of it is, in various ways, are the rulers of the Gentiles lording it over them, but with worship music and a giving campaign.

The anarchist church is not opposed to leadership. It is opposed to lordship. It is not opposed to structure. It is opposed to the kind of structure that serves the institution rather than the body, that consolidates power rather than dispersing it, that mistakes its own continuation for the Kingdom of God.

It is organized around the conviction that the Spirit distributes gifts through the whole body; not just through the ordained, not just through the credentialed, not just through the platform-holders, and that the community’s job is to see clearly enough to recognize and affirm what the Spirit has already done. Which requires being small enough to actually know each other. It also requires being humble enough to believe the Spirit might move through someone you didn’t expect. Which requires being hungry enough to keep the windows open.

The Future

Here is what I feel and believe the Spirit is actually building, underneath all the noise.

Communities small enough to know each other’s names and bear each other’s burdens without a small groups ministry to organize it. Communities old enough to hold the creeds without embarrassment and read the fathers without irony. Communities open enough to expect the Spirit to move; to heal, to speak, to gift, to do the thing you didn’t plan for and couldn’t have produced. Communities ungovernable by anything but love, which means ungovernable by market logic, political tribe, celebrity pastor, or institutional self-interest.

It looks like Acts 2:42 in a living room. It looks like what Basil built in Caesarea; a community of shared life so different from its surroundings that the city stopped and asked what was happening. It looks like the Didache’s community, which could follow a rule of prayer and welcome an unannounced prophet in the same breath, which elected its leaders and received its wandering teachers and broke bread together and meant it.

It does not look like what we have largely built. But the Spirit has survived worse institutional weather than this. He was present in the catacombs. He was present when Athanasius stood alone. He was present in the desert when the fathers fled the compromised church for the silence, and there he met them, and there they became the tradition that carried the faith to every subsequent generation.

He is present now. He has not withdrawn. He has not been abolished by the completion of the canon or the failures of the institution or the departure of a generation that got tired of being sold something. He is where he has always been: in the body, moving through the whole community, distributing gifts as he wills, waiting for a people humble enough to follow rather than manage Him.

The ancient church was anarchist before it was anything else. Creedal before it was institutional. Spirit-filled before it was respectable. Small before it was influential.

That is not a description of the past. That is a description of what is coming.

The question is whether we want it badly enough to stop protecting what we have and start following where he leads. Will we be beautiful they way were intended to be?

The windows are open. The wind blows where it wishes. You can hear the sound of it. It’s time to move with as it does. And when we do, we will be that beautiful organism that will stop people where they are and make them say: This…this is what I have been looking for and what has been looking for me.