NOT REALLY A "BLUEPRINT"
Posted by: prophetic <prophetic@...>
"What is the Church, and what are the churches?"
-by T. Austin Sparks.
Have we in the New Testament a clearly defined and completely set-out plan of
the Church, its order, constitution, methods and work? Is there a concise and
worked-out system in the nature of a 'blue-print', which is ready for copying
and reproducing everywhere, and can be recognised as true to type in every
place? The answer is decidedly No! But if we mean: Is there in the New Testament
a revelation of God's mind as to the Church, in its nature, constitution, and
vocation? it is no contradiction of the above when we say: Yes, decidedly
Yes!
It is possible to take parts of the New Testament, as to doctrines,
practices, work, methods, and order, to piece them together, and to frame them into a
system to be adopted and applied. This is the mechanical or 'ecclesiastical'
method, and it is capable of an almost endless variety of presentations,
resulting in a very large variety of organized bodies, every one of which claims the
New Testament for its authority. This in turn issues in rivalries,
competitiveness, controversy, and, eventually, in the presenting to the world of a
Christianity divided into a vast number of independent and unrelated parts, far
removed from 'all speaking the same thing'. The external and objective approach to
the New Testament, with a view to studying it as a manual or text-book of
Christian life, teaching and work, is a false one, a dangerous one, and - so far
as any real spiritual outcome is concerned - a dead one. If God had meant
successive generations of Christians to IMITATE the first and proceed on the
mass-production principle, surely He would have seen to it that in some way a
precise and unmistakable prototype existed, with adequate safeguards against all
the confusion and misapprehension which has actually eventuated.
When men, Christian men, contemplate a project which is intended to last for
a considerable tenure, they set down precisely their 'Principles and
Practice', consisting of their doctrines, their purpose, their practices, their
methods, and so on. God did not commission or allow His first Apostles to act in this
way, so that we might have a Jerusalem or Antioch Blue Book or Manual for
Christian churches. In the Divine mind it is all definite, fixed, precise, and
permanent, but when we come to the New Testament, and especially the formative
period as covered by the Book of the Acts, everything seems so fluid, so open,
and so subject to proving. There is the most wonderful and sublime reason for
this; but, before we come to that, let us point out that the approach to which
we have referred above is the cause of more limitation, stagnation, deadly
legality, than can be measured. In doctrine, it means that the doctrinal compass
is boxed and no new light is allowed as to God's Word. Of course, this is the
peril of orthodoxy. The intense desire to safeguard the Scriptures can lead
to a sealing off against any new light from them as to meaning and
interpretation, and this makes for a static spiritual position. Spiritual pride, bigotry,
exclusiveness, suspicion, are some of the unholy brood of this legalism. If
Satan cannot force to the one extreme of superiority to the written Word, he
will try the opposite of bondage to the letter without the spirit.
Christianity has almost entirely come to be such a thing now, and it is
practically impossible for the vast majority of Christians - their leaders
especially - to understand or even believe that God can do His work
without committees, boards, machinery, advertisement, organizations,
appeals, reports, names, deputations, patronage, propaganda, publicity,
the press, etc. Unless these things are present with a 'recognised'
backing, the thing is not trusted, even if it is believed to exist.
We are aware that the foregoing is mainly negative, but it is necessary in
order to lead to the positive, to which we now proceed.
We have said that the New Testament has within it a revelation, precise,
definite, and full, as to God's mind for this dispensation, and that in that
revelation there is an answer to all the questions of What? Who? and How? in all
matters of the Church's constitution and vocation. What is that revelation? The
answer is that it is not a system, as such, but a Person. That which in the
New Testament is secondary, and a consequence, has now been made primary. That
is, the results have been made the first and governing things, whilst that
which comes before them as the cause is overlooked. If we will look again, we
shall see that anything that came into being under the Holy Spirit's first
activity was the result of a seeing of Christ.
With the Apostles that seeing was subsequent to the days of physical
association. During the forty days after His resurrection it was like the dawning of a
new day. First, those intimations, as when the uncertain light just passes
over the heavens. Then more steady and certain rays, leading to the Day of
Pentecost, when the sun appeared in full glory over the horizon dispelling the last
shadow of uncertainty. On that day they saw Him as by an opened heaven. The
mystery of the past was dispelled. The Bible lay open like a new book. They saw
Him in the light of eternity. They began to see that, while He was the
glorified, personal, Son of God, He was Himself the embodiment of a great, a vast
heavenly and spiritual order and system. This SEEING was absolutely
revolutionary. It was a crisis out of which a new world and a new creation was born. True
to this fundamental principle, all that vast revelation, which has come down
the centuries from and through the Apostle Paul took its rise from that crisis
described by him as "It pleased God... to reveal his Son in me" (Gal. 1:16).
'I received it... by revelation of Jesus Christ' (vs. 12). All the implicates
were in the crisis; the full content was a progressive and ever-growing
revelation.
While there was some initial testimony the Apostles did not formulate in
conference an enterprise, a mission, with all the related arrangements and
organization. The new life forced off the old leaves and dressed the new organism
with a new vesture FROM WITHIN. The might, energy and urge of the Holy Spirit
within produced a Way and an order, un-thought-of, unintended by them, and always
to their own surprise. What was happening was really that Christ was taking
form within them, individually and corporately, by new birth and growth. The
believers and the companies were becoming an expression of Christ. Here, we come
upon the essential nature of the Christian life and the Church.
What, in the thought of God do Christians exist for? What does the Church
exist for? What do local churches exist for? There is only one answer. The
existence and the function is to be an expression of Christ. There is nothing less
and nothing more than that. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning
and the end, and all between! Let that be the starting-point; let that be the
governing rule and reality in ALL MATTERS of life and work, and see at once the
nature and vocation of the Church. This vast, incomprehensible heavenly
system, of which Christ is the personal embodiment, touches every detail of life,
personally and collectively. But remember only the Holy Spirit sees and knows
how it is so; hence, as at the beginning, there has to be an utter submission to
and direction by the Lordship of the Holy Spirit. What the blood-stream is to
the human body, the Divine life is to and in 'the Church which is His body'.
What the nerve system is in the physical realm, the Holy Spirit is in the
spiritual. Understand all the workings of those two systems in the natural, and
you begin to see how God has written His great heavenly principles, first in the
person of His Son, and then in His corporate Body. As an individual believer
is the result of a begetting, a conception, a formation, a birth and a
likeness, so, in, the New Testament, is a true local church. It is a reproduction of
Christ by the Holy Spirit. Man cannot make, form, produce or, 'establish'
this. Neither can anyone 'join' or 'enrol', or make himself or herself a member of
this organism. First it is an embryo, and then a 'formation' after Christ.
So, all talk about 'forming New Testament churches' is nonsense. The
beginning is in a seeing of Christ, and when two or three in one place have seen Him
by the Holy Spirit, and have been "begotten again by the word of God", there is
the germ of a church.