The Pilgrim’s Protest

Many apostates have numbered amongst CIU graduates; certainly our school’s students are no less immune to falling away from the faith than any other generation of Christians. The New Testament itself repeatedly exhorts believers to keep the faith, and the author of Hebrews addresses the issue directly. Hebrews 3:12-13 says: “Take care that there be not in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day…so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” How, according to these verses, may a Christian be preserved from descent into sin terminating in total unbelief? This passage instances mutual encouragement as the antidote. Which seems, at first sight, like a strangely anemic response; either the author or the translators must have envisioned a much more robust form of encouragement than that with which I am familiar between Christians: the author of Hebrews speaks here of an encouragement potent enough to combat sin and apostasy. Despite talk about confrontation and bearing each other’s burdens, few of us at CIU, I think, experience this mysterious and volatile encouragement, and almost none of us, as per Hebrews, on a “day after day” basis. Despite the fact that all of us sin day in and day out, only very rarely do any of us receive or minister invasive correction and help. And this is only one of the New Testament’s supposedly 58 “one another commands”—my point being, we are categorically failing to practice the corporate spirituality taught by the New Testament.

It is entirely possible that a given CIU student could have a daily quiet time, attend chapel, minister in some capacity in a local church, have close friends, even participate in an intimate Bible study, and still live out a virtually pietistic faith, wherein the impetus and fuel of spiritual life are mediated by the individual to himself or herself rather than to and from the group; wherein progression to spiritual maturity is basically envisioned as a solitary pilgrim trek rather than a family journey; wherein the quiet time is the quintessential spiritual event rather than a jostling, ardent band; wherein each person could really, if push came to shove, survive spiritually with just my Bible and my Jesus rather than depending constantly on others for preservation from sin and apostasy, as Hebrews demands. But such a spirituality is neither the teaching of the New Testament nor the desire of our hearts. Only a few examples will demonstrate the scripturality of this fact: Salvation and baptism (visible incorporation into the Body of Christ) are so confusingly inextricable in the New Testament because a new relationship with God is at the same time a new relationship with his people – fellowship with God’s children entails fellowship with Him (1 Jn 1:3). Maturity in Christ is an indisputably corporate enterprise (Eph 4:11-16; Col 2:19), and we are indispensable to one another’s perseverance in Christ (Heb 3:13). The Bible was mostly written for communities, and we would be mistaken to read it too solitarily. While the New Testament does not instruct us specifically how to conduct a quiet time, every epistle addresses different aspects of community life and worship; I am not criticizing the former discipline, – I would question the regeneracy of those who do not spend significant time privately with God, e.g. Mt 6:6 – only its relative biblical importance. Even our quintessential pattern for prayer in the Lord’s Prayer is a communal pattern, addressed to “Our Father.” In sum, meeting with other believers should not be a helpful addendum to spiritual life; meeting with other believers is essential to real relationship with God.
What is the context for this communal spirituality? The New Testament seems to call for active, organic, decentralized, participatory meetings of local believers: “When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation” (1 Cor 14:26). Every person present was responsible to bring something, in what a professor of mine termed “a spiritual potluck.” Believers gathered in small numbers (estimated 10-40 people) in homes for the first centuries of our faith, not for economic reasons but for scriptural and theological. The reason Scripture portrays Christian meetings as taking place in homes (1 Cor 16:19; Acts 20:20; Rom 16:5; Col 4:15; Philemon 1:2, etc) was not persecution or poverty, but the early church’s pictorial theology of the church as a family, a body, or a household. For Christianity to subsist in a way that makes these descriptions meaningful demands this intimate, informal, participatory form. By contrast, what is familial about sitting together for an hour? The organic ecclesiology outlined above does not ignore the New Testament teaching on elders, some of whom evidently were gifted to teach (1 Ti 5:17). It does, however, insist on a genuine plurality of leaders rather than a disguised monarchy in which one man tries futilely to exercise all the spiritual gifts of the local body while their rightful practitioners look passively on every week.
A few students on campus participate in house churches or in Bible studies and small groups which replicate them. But for the rest of us, as many conversations in recent weeks have proven to me, we do not have community; we do not really have church. Our weekly excursion to a formal, centralized, passive local church does not meet our spiritual needs. Sometimes, by God’s mercy, the impersonal sermon will speak to our specific situation, but not as a group of bosom friends, drenched in Scripture, might. Occasionally we know someone in our church well enough to encourage them in the manner of Hebrews to keep them from sin and unbelief, but not as we consistently could with real confidantes whose lives we know intimately enough to concretely address. There are restless and thirsty hearts at CIU, longing for the communion with one another that we all know intuitively is part of communion with God. CIU has not been blind to this reality. In fact, various solutions to this epidemic of spiritual isolationism have been proposed or enacted. The freshman dorms with their leadership teams are an attempt to create real community. There is talk of remaking the dorms in the future so as to be more architecturally conducive to communal living. Last semester some tried to institute a mentorship program between willing graduate and undergraduate students. RA’s clamor to offer themselves as spiritual confidantes and resources. However, all of these inexorably have failed or will fail, except as they provide a venue for potential community into which students must step with Christian love. Community is a complex of relationships, and these can in no way be institutionalized. My youth group once designated an accountability partner for me, and we faithfully prayed for each other and disclosed our struggles week after week. But the whole thing was artificial and, ultimately, sterile, because we weren’t friends and our relationship was imposed. I once asked a man to mentor me, but because his interest did not match my own and because he was entirely outside my college milieu, he could not be the pursuant mentor I desired. Unless relationships, community, and church are borne solely of real, unforced desire to pursue and love specific people, they will be fruitless and perceptibly false.
What is to be done? Is it possible for the New Testament church to cooperate with the institutionalized church as we know it? Can New Testament Christianity exist in a university setting? It seems to me that no setting where believers are together should prevent the church functioning as a body and family. If Paul and Silas can have church in the jail cell (Acts 16:25), then we ought be able to have church according to the New Testament in our local churches and at CIU – by which I mean small, informal, intimate, participatory groups of friends meeting and being led by older, more mature Christians. What will it require of faculty and students? It means first and foremost that we all need to plead to God for community at our college, because if Hebrews is right, then we must have real church to survive spiritually lest we be hardened by sin. We are debilitating ourselves in our sanctification and Great Commission fruitfulness to continue on in our pietistic, individualistic ways. However, for me to suggest a program or procedure to realize genuine community at CIU would risk the formalization which opposes vital, communal, New Testament Christianity. I can only encourage friends to meet together to scripturally share, pray, eat, and worship, and urge faculty and older students to engage in discipling relationships with groups of younger students. The student body is starving for older Christians to invest in them.
Let us pursue and love one another, because we need one another to follow Christ.