Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – The Dilemma of State Church Structures in Europe
The features of the Constantinian Church are similar to a Lutheran conception of the Church as the place for preaching of the gospel and administering the sacraments. A missional Church is where the people of God—in following Christ—participate in God’s mission through being, word and deed in their daily lives. The symbols of the Constantinian Church are the place, the temple, the word, the sacred; whereas, the symbols of the missional Church are the way, discipleship, wholeness and everyday life. Likewise, one can distinguish between the custodians of the Constantinian Church—a clerical hierarchy of static institutions—and the custodians of the missional Church—lay people who dynamically live out their faith in everyday situations.
In the midst of this paradigm shift, the question is: How can we be God’s Church in our time? This is not a matter of new methods or models. Encountering the challenges of the Church and a changing society, Europeans tend to think in terms of analyses, solutions and projects—new church models, electronic church, reshaped worship and evangelization efforts.
In reality, the shift we experience raises questions about the theology and spirituality. We are forced to reread scripture about what it means to be God’s people in the world. In this light, one can only wonder how, for decades, we have made the whole known church structure such an integral part of the gospel, and how we have carried out a determined reduction of the gospel (from making disciples to a preoccupation with the personal salvation of the individual) and what it means to be Church—from the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church to a Church that defines itself only by what it does (i.e., the preaching of the gospel and the administration of baptism and communion). In this way, the reformers shifted the attention away from what the Church is to what the Church does. Through this focus on sermon and sacraments the church service became the primary task of the Church. The reality is, the Church is also called to engage in functions like fellowship, making disciples, service and witness. Wilbert Shenk is preoccupied with the same issue:
“The confessional statements…all emphasize the function rather than the being of the Church. Ecclesiologically, the Church is turned inward. The thrust of these statements, which were the very basis for catechising and guiding the faithful, rather than equipping and mobilizing the Church to engage the world, was to guard and preserve.”6
In this way, there was little room for the gifts of the Spirit, equipping, mission and the service of lay people.
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