Beauty So Ancient and So New: 7 Part Series: Part 3: The Church Was Never Supposed to Be This

I sat in a church service a few years ago and I watched three thousand people consume a production. The lights were right. The transitions were tight. The pastor was engaging, visibly humble in that practiced way, and the whole thing moved like a well-oiled machine toward its predetermined emotional landing. Nobody was unkind. Nothing was technically wrong. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching something that had almost nothing to do with what Irenaeus meant when he talked about the church.

This is not a complaint about megachurches (some are amazing), specifically. Small churches do this too, just with worse production values. It’s a complaint about a category error; the mistake of organizing the people of God the way you’d organize a product launch, and then wondering why the people of God feel like consumers rather than a body. Why we struggle with discipleship and retention and how people grow out of their faith, it seems.

Irenaeus, writing in the second century against the Gnostics, kept insisting on something that felt almost embarrassingly simple: the church is the place where the Spirit of God is and the Spirit of God is where the church is. It isn’t where the right ideas are and where the correct doctrine is defended in the abstract. The church is where the Spirit actually dwells: which is in the community, the body, the gathered flesh-and-blood people who belong to Christ. “Where the Church is,” he wrote, “there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace.” (Against Heresies, III.24.1)

He wasn’t being sentimental. He was being specific. The church is not a vendor of religious goods and services. It is the dwelling place of the living God. Which means walking into it should feel at least slightly like walking into something alive, something you can’t entirely manage, and something that might do something unexpected.

When is the last time you were in a church service where something unexpected happened?

Before the Empire Got Involved

Here is what I keep mulling over: the pre-Nicene church, the church before Constantine gave it the motion of common place and a political portfolio, was not running on the organizational logic we now assume is simply how churches work. It met in homes. Its leaders were recognizable by their suffering before they were recognizable by their titles. Its authority was dispersed through the body in a way that made any one person’s claim to total control theologically incoherent.

That’s not romanticism. That’s just what the texts show. The Didache (did-uh-kee) gives instructions for traveling prophets and apostles that assume the Spirit moves through people you don’t know yet, people who will show up at your door, and people you’ll need to discern. There’s no centralized clearinghouse for this. There’s not a denominational office issuing credentials. There is a community, a rule of life, and an expectation that God is actually doing something in it.

Then Constantine happened. And I want to be careful here, because the standard “Constantine ruined everything” narrative is too easy; the faith spread, the creeds were written, the great councils happened, and we should be grateful for Nicaea even if we’re suspicious of what Nicaea made possible institutionally. But something did happen. The church acquired power. And power, as the fathers knew better than we do, is almost always the thing that kills the thing you were trying to protect.

Basil of Caesarea, who I think was simultaneously one of the most rigorous theological minds of the fourth century and a man who sold his inheritance to feed the poor and built the first hospital in recorded history, watched this happening in real time. He spent much of his life fighting bishops who had traded theological integrity for imperial favor. His letters are full of a kind of exhausted grief about it. The institution was winning and the Spirit of the Living God was being bureaucratized.

The Spirit Did Not Get the Memo About Cessationism

I grew up in spaces where the charismatic tradition was viewed with suspicion, and sometimes rightfully so. You know, a little embarrassing, theologically underdeveloped, and prone to excess. And the excesses are real. I’ve seen enough spiritual circus to last several lifetimes. But here’s what I’ve never been able to reconcile with the cessationist position: the fathers didn’t believe it.

Not Irenaeus, who describes healings and prophecy in his own communities in the second century. Not Origen, who is careful and philosophical about everything and still matter-of-factly mentions that miracles happen. Not Basil, whose entire theology of the Spirit assumes that the Spirit is present and active and doing things right now. Not Chrysostom, who mourns the apparent decline of certain gifts in his own era. Not because they were supposed to stop, but because the church’s coldness had quenched them.

The split between doctrinal seriousness and pneumatological expectation is not an ancient distinction. It is a modern wound. The answer to rootless charismatic enthusiasm is not a Spirit-quenching sobriety. The answer is depth. The creed in one hand and an open palm in the other.

Basil put it this way: the Spirit distributes gifts as he wills, knitting the body together in love. (On the Holy Spirit, IX.22) He is not a department of the institutional church. He is not a resource to be managed. He moves where he wishes. And the church’s job is not to manage him but to remain the kind of community he can actually move through; which means humble, hungry, and small enough to actually know each other.

Anarchist Is Not a Dirty Word

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this is going to become an argument for no structure, no accountability, every man doing what is right in his own eyes. It isn’t. The earliest church had elders, deacons, a rule of faith that functioned as a guardrail against the endless novelty-production that heresy always is. Structure is not the problem. The wrong kind of structure, structure that exists to consolidate power rather than to serve the body, that is the problem.

When I say the church is anarchist at its best, I mean something specific: its authority is cruciform. It looks like a basin and a towel, not a corner office. It is dispersed through the whole body rather than concentrated at the top. It derives its legitimacy not from institutional succession alone but from the Spirit’s presence. Which is why Irenaeus could say that a simple elder who actually lives the faith is worth more than a bishop who has the right credentials and a dead heart.

The anarchist church is not opposed to leadership. It is opposed to lordship. Jesus was pretty clear about the distinction (Mark 10:42-45), even if we’ve spent two millennia finding ways to blur it.

So What Does the Future Look Like

Thomas Oden spent his last decades arguing that the way forward is behind us; the consensual orthodoxy of the first eight centuries is not a museum piece but a living inheritance, that the creeds are not a ceiling but a floor. He was right. And he would be the first to tell you that retrieval without expectation becomes historical excavation. You can have all the right doctrine and a completely dead church. The bones need breath.

The future of the church, the one I think the Spirit is actually building, beneath the noise of the culture wars and the celebrity pastor scandals and the institutional decay, looks something like this: small enough to know each other’s names. Old enough to hold the creeds without embarrassment and open enough to expect the Spirit to move. All the while being ungovernable by anything but love.

It looks like Acts 2:42 in a house, among people, with the windows open. It looks like what Basil built in Caesarea; a community of shared life that made the surrounding city stop and ask what on earth was happening. It looks like what the Didache describes: people who know how to welcome a stranger and discern a prophet and share a meal and mean it.

It does not look like what we have largely built. But that’s not a reason for despair. The Spirit has survived worse institutional weather than this. The fathers were writing letters to each other across an empire that wanted them dead, and somehow the thing held together; and it wasn’t because of their organizational genius, but because the head of the church was alive and refused to let his body stay buried.

That’s still true. That’s what im betting on and leaning into as a pastor of my church.

And if you’re sitting in the overflow parking lot of a religious production feeling like something is missing, you’re not wrong. Something is. But it’s not gone. It’s just waiting for a community small enough and humble enough and hungry enough to stop managing it and start following it.

The ancient church was anarchist before it was anything else. Maybe that’s where we go next.

Part 4: The Fathers Were Not Cessatonalist (And Neither Should We Be) next.