A Gathered People: Revisioning the Assembly as Transforming Encounter

A GATHERED PEOPLE

Revisioning the Assembly as Transforming Encounter

A GATHERED PEOPLE

Revisioning the Assembly as Transforming Encounter

John Mark Hicks, Johnny Melton & Bobby Valentine

A Gathered People

Revisioning the Assembly as Transforming Encounter

Copyright 2007 by John Mark Hicks Johnny Melton & Bobby Valentine

ISBN 978-0-89112-550-1

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Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishers.

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Dedication

To those whom we love but cannot see except as we meet them around God’s throne every Lord’s Day

Introduction

Sacramental Encounter?

The 2006 May issue of The Christian Chronicle highlighted a Gallup Poll which identified members of the Churches of Christ as more likely than any other group to attend weekly worship services. ¹ According to the poll, 68% attend a weekly religious service. Mormons ranked second with Pentecostals and Southern Baptists third and fourth—all of whom were 60% or more. Interestingly, the more liturgical churches (Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal) ranked significantly lower, ranging from 32% for Episcopalians to 45% for Roman Catholics.

If these numbers are to be believed—and that is not a given since people do lie about going to church—the most cynical among us, and perhaps the most astute, might see this as more of an embarrassment than a bragging point. One might surmise that the reason Churches of Christ rank so high is rooted in a legal understanding of the assembly—go to church or go to hell. Neglect of the assembly has always been one of the most significant marks of unfaithfulness in Churches of Christ, so much so that whoever is present every time the doors are open is accorded the highest compliment in our community— they are a faithful member of the church.

While we do not underestimate the significance of such considerations, there is something more substantial in our history that has shaped our high view of church attendance. Whether it is formative for the present membership is not something we are prepared to say, but that it is a perspective rooted strongly in our history is quite clear. It has been said that Churches of Christ have three sacraments:

Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Day or assembly. This is a significant aspect of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Thomas Campbell, one of its founders, linked these three together. Here, then, he wrote, are the three grand comprehensive positive, ordinances of the gospel; namely, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the Lord’s Day, all designed to keep the blissful subject of our present and eternal salvation, in its causes, effects, and consequences, before our minds: and one day every week publicly set apart for those joyful purposes.²Alexander Campbell, Thomas’ son, called those three ordinances the positive institutions of the Christian system. They are the indispensable provisions of remedial mercy and not one of them can be dispensed with by any who desire the perfection of the Christian state and of the Christian character.³Their remedial significance is rooted in their relation to the death, burial and resurrection of Christ which is the grounds of justification and hope.⁴In other words, they are gospel and catholic (universal) ordinances,⁵that is, "means of grace through which the hand of God writes upon our hearts the character of his Son.⁶From its beginning, the Stone-Campbell Movement has held that the transformational gospel ordinances, or sacraments" (as we will call them), are Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and the Assembly.

This is not merely the Campbells. It became embedded in our corporate consciousness, our Stone-Campbell DNA. At the centennial celebration of the Declaration and Address in 1909, Carey Morgan speaks as a veritable representative of the whole movement: There are three such memorials: the Lord’s Supper, Baptism and the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Supper is a memorial of his death, Baptism is a symbol of his burial, and the Lord’s Day celebrates his resurrection.⁷

Theologically, these gospel ordinances have ordinarily been understood something along the following lines. Baptism is a means of grace for justification through participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace for sanctification through remembrance and/or communion with the death of Christ. The Lord’s Day is a means of grace for communal worship through celebration of the resurrection. In short, these gospel events mediate the presence of Christ and his grace to his community. They are sacraments in the sense that they are external events (specific moments in space and time) which not only signify the gospel but also through which God acts by faith to communicate justifying and sanctifying grace to his people through Jesus in the power of the Spirit.

The problematic dimension of this description is the means of grace language. This may be too overtly sacramental for many. Though we believe this language is our movement at its theological best, we have generally been oriented toward more anthropocentric (human-centered) understandings of these positive institutions. Our anti-sacramentalism owes more to Zwinglian Protestantism or Lockean epistemology than we might want to admit. Anthropocentric understandings of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are marks of Evangelical (born-again) orthodoxy. For example, some within the Stone-Campbell Movement have reduced Baptism to a line in the sand between the lost and the saved through the application of a legal hermeneutic that concentrates more on the human act than the divine one while others have moved away from understanding Baptism as a divine act of grace toward regarding it as primarily, perhaps merely, a human testimonial. Some have reduced the significance of the Lord’s Supper to cognitive reflection on the death of Jesus or private introspection of our unworthiness. Some have reduced attendance on the Lord’s Day to a legal duty or to an occasion for mutual edification rather than anything remotely connected with sacramental imagination.

In recent books I have addressed two of these three positive institutions—the Lord’s Supper and Baptism.⁸Part of my purpose in those books—and this one—is to renew a sacramental understanding among us, that is, to refocus our attention on what God is doing through these events. My prayer is to reorient our thinking from an anthropocentric, human-centered understanding of these events as mere acts of human obedience to a more theocentric understanding of these events as divine acts of grace through which God encounters obedient believers to transform them into his image through the presence of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. This is what I mean by sacrament—an external symbol through which God acts to give grace to his people through faith. Having defined it, I will no longer place the word in quotation marks.

Why use the word sacrament or sacramental? I understand that this is not our language (Campbell did not like it because it is not a word found in Scripture). I also understand that it is subject to misunderstanding—debates over the sacraments have a long history. So why use it? I believe it is helpful and historic shorthand for the theological idea I want to convey (in much the same way that eschatological is shorthand for all the events that will take place from the second coming of Christ to the appearance of a new heaven and new earth). It saves a lot of space. My definition of sacrament is consistent with the substance of the historic church’s use. It is not specifically Roman Catholic, Protestant (e.g., Lutheran, Anglican and Presbyterian) or Orthodox since the common meaning between them is that by faith God gives grace through material symbols. Differences between them emerge because other concepts are added to that basic idea. Instead of repeating these words over and over, I have chosen to use the word sacrament as a technical shorthand because it conveys this meaning in the common language of the historic Christian faith. If anyone dislikes the term, I am not bound to it. It is not necessary for Christian discourse. So, if the term is offensive for whatever reason, when the term sacrament appears in the text simply read by faith God gives grace through material symbols in the power of the Spirit by whom we participate in the future.

In this book I, along with my friends Bobby Valentine and Johnny Melton, reflect on the sacramental significance of the Lord’s Day assembly (or any assembly intending to gather in God’s presence as Matthew 18:20 describes). This completes my Stone-Campbell sacramental trilogy. In Come to the Table I argued that the Lord’s Supper is a means by which we experience the presence of the living Christ and enjoy a renewal of future hope. Indeed, we experience that future anew every time we eat and drink at the Lord’s table. It is an authentic communion with God through Christ in the power of the Spirit. Additionally, in Down in the River to Pray Greg Taylor and I argued that Baptism is a means of grace by which we encounter the saving act of God in Christ through his death and resurrection. We participate in the gospel and are renewed by the Spirit through our burial and resurrection with Christ. Both Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are moments of communion, participation and encounter. They are not primarily modes of human obedience for testing our loyalty to God, nor are they mere human testimonies. Rather, they serve the goal of transformation into the image of Christ. They are means to an end—means by which grace as dynamic divine presence conforms us to the image of Christ through faith. This is the sense in which I use the term sacramental—the mystery of God’s action toward us by faith through the external means of water, wine, bread and the assembled community.

The sacraments, however, are not substitutes for discipleship but rather moments of encounter with God through which we are moved along the path of discipleship toward entire sanctification. Unfortunately, I fear that our churches have drunk too deeply from the wells of Evangelicalism or been too deeply shaped by a legal hermeneutic. The kind of sacramentalism which I describe here is not popular. Evangelicalism and the legal hermeneutic embedded in the Stone-Campbell Movement have something in common—they ultimately disconnect the sacraments from discipleship and empty all sacramental imagination from these positive ordinances. Baptism can become a mere sign and/or a mere test of loyalty. The Lord’s Supper can become a form of individualistic piety and/or a weekly duty. Part of our challenge as heirs of the Stone-Campbell Movement is to reconnect discipleship and sacramentalism, and it is consonant with—even demanded by–our heritage to do so.

A golden opportunity is before us. An example is the Emerging Church Movement. This postmodern missional movement values discipleship—it advocates environmentalism (e.g., stewardship of God’s good creation), economic justice (e.g., our responsibility to the poor), social justice (liberation of the oppressed), and spiritual disciplines (e.g., prayer and fasting). The postmodern church also values the ancient faith of the early church, though it does not quite know what to do with the sacraments. Here, for example, Brian McLaren is indebted to the Anabaptism of his youth and he does not shed Zwinglian (Evangelical) baptismal theology.⁹In the postmodern search for roots there is a yearning for divine presence and discipleship. The Stone-Campbell Movement has something to offer postmoderns in the form of a sacramental imagination that connects life (discipleship) and sacrament (Baptism, Lord’s Supper and Lord’s Day).

Our third sacrament, the Lord’s Day assembly or any assembly gathered in God’s presence, is in need of particular rehabilitation. There is a marked tendency to think about the Lord’s Day anthropocentrically rather than sacramentally. For some, assembly is primarily about mutual edification, as if it is mostly something believers do for each other (or seekers). Others construe it primarily as a legal duty with which we comply by performing the five acts of worship, as if assembly is mostly something we do for God. In the former God is a spectator and in the latter he is the audience. This book confronts these anthropocentric understandings of assembly which are driven by what I regard as a reduction of assembly to horizontal and/or legal dimensions. The competing dangers are that assembly can become a mere occasion for mutual encouragement or it can become primarily the ongoing public test of faithfulness (e.g., Baptism is our first test of public loyalty and the Lord’s Supper on the Lord’s Day is the continual test of public loyalty). In the former, the assembly is fundamentally horizontal and susceptible to consumerist ideology. In the latter, assembly is fundamentally a legal duty and susceptible to the dynamics of power and control. In contrast, assembly is fundamentally sacramental, that is, it is an encounter between God and his people for the sake of transformation and spiritual formation within the community as community. Assembly is fundamentally where God does something for us—he serves us as we serve him.

In the past, Evangelical and Stone-Campbell theology have been too cognitive in their enjoyment of Baptism, Lord’s Supper and Lord’s Day rather than sacramental. Some are more concerned that we do the assembly right. In addition, contemporary practice is becoming so experiential that it is losing theological substance. Some are more concerned about how we feel in the assembly. Some have emphasized the past rather than the future and settled into memory rather than the alreadiness of the eschaton (the idea that our future hope is already present in some dynamic way). Others have emphasized the experience rather than transformation. Where there has been some awareness of sacramental presence it was usually focused on issues of precision (what is the nature of Christ’s presence in the bread?) and timing (when are we saved?). I would prefer to reorient the discussion under a future (eschatological) horizon toward the notion of practicing the kingdom the God for the sake of transforming community and creation.

Practicing the kingdom of God is pursuing communal and individual habits (a discipled lifestyle) through which the reign of God breaks into the world, gives apocalyptic status to the community of God (we are resident aliens in the fallen world), and by which we experience the future into which God is drawing us.¹⁰The sacraments become eschatological moments where the future becomes present; where the coming age—that is already here—breaks into the old age. In Baptism we experience our own future resurrection and are invested with the kingdom’s apocalyptic mission in a fallen world. In the Lord’s Supper we experience the future messianic banquet as Jesus hosts his table in his kingdom.

In this sacramental vision the Lord’s Day assembly becomes the eschatological day of assembly. As the gathered community of God on what is both creation day and resurrection day we experience the future reign of God in terms of new creation and resurrection. Indeed, assembly becomes heaven on earth, as Eastern Orthodox theology envisions. More pointedly, it is a moment when we draw near to the Father and Jesus in their eschatological glory. Through the Spirit we enter the heavenly Jerusalem where we share the future with all the saints gathered around the world and spread throughout time. Through the Spirit the assembly mediates to us the eschatological assembly of God’s people around the throne that transcends time and space.

This experience is more meaningful to me than almost any other. I have told my story in several other writings.¹¹I have lost a wife, a father and a son to death. Unlike many grievers, I rarely visit their graves. I feel no compulsion or need to do that. It is not a meaningful experience for me, though it is for many and God be praised for the comfort he gives through those visitations. For me, however, given my sacramental understanding of assembly, I enjoy the presence of my departed loved ones when I assemble with the saints—past and present—on the Lord’s Day. There we meet in sweet communion as the whole of the heavenly Jerusalem gathers in festive assembly. There I feel closer to my son than when I visit his grave. Assembly is an eschatological experience, a sacramental presence. It is the union of time and space in the presence of God. It is a moment when the living and the dead are together before the throne.

Given this vision and the intent to practice the kingdom of God, the dichotomy between life (discipleship) and assembly (communal gatherings) is unfortunate. They should be correlated rather than compartmentalized. We bring sacrificed lives as sacrificial offerings into the assembly and assembly empowers sacrificial living as God mediates his presence to us through communal praise. When assembly devalues discipleship so that one day a week becomes the essence of Christianity or when discipleship devalues assembly so that assembling becomes merely a function of mutual encouragement, experiential excitement and/or a legal requirement, then both lose their power and purpose. I seek a balance that values the sacramental presence of God through assembly, while at the same time valuing how disciples of Jesus are daily instruments of kingdom presence in the world.

Discipleship (daily kingdom living) is essential—it is part of the process of conformation to the image of God, but assembly is also essential to the shaping of the people of God into that image. The assembly shapes communal identity, forms a concrete manifestation of the body of Christ as community, empowers discipleship and sustains the people of God as they are nourished by divine presence. Assembling—whenever or wherever we assemble (not only on the Lord’s Day)—is a means of grace, a transforming encounter.

I have invited Bobby Valentine and Johnny Melton to help me with this book. These friends share my conviction about the sacramental significance of assembly and its relation to discipleship. I appreciate their willingness to write with me and they have greatly enhanced the usefulness of this book with their unique contributions. The book is truly a collaborative effort.

We thank our families, especially our wives—Jennifer, Karen, and Pamella—for