Review of Your Church is too small

John H. Armstrong’s Your Church is too small

A book Review

By Dan McDonald

 

 

            I have known John Armstrong for thirty years.  In 1980 I was living in Illinois and was attracted to a ministry within a Baptist Church in Oklahoma.  I was 25 and ready to make the move.  I was pursuing the right church within the whole cultural smorgasbord of churches and places of worship.  I knew better than to look for “the perfect church” because as the cliché went if I found the perfect church I would ruin it.  But I was looking for the next best thing.  With all the different churches proclaiming so many different perspectives on the Christian faith one had to be careful so as to discover the church that really had the Christian message.  I moved all the way from Bloomington, Illinois to Sand Springs, Oklahoma in May of 1980 to go to the church to whose ministry I was attracted.

            I smile at the irony of how I was drawn to Oklahoma, where one of my pastor’s best friends was another pastor named John Armstrong who then pastored a church in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.  If I had known of his ministry at the time I may well have remained in Illinois.  But the more important element of the story I am telling was my mindset at the time I made the move.  It was a mindset common within the churches to which I was attracted, and to be honest also the mindset of many churches to which I wasn’t attracted.  We saw thousands of diverse Christian denominations and a plethora of perspectives and we were not encouraged by diversity but overwhelmed to the point that we had to be very careful or we would get into the wrong sort of church and the wrong sort of churches abounded.  We thought perhaps that the number of churches that had lost the Gospel were far more than those which maintained a relationship to the Gospel.  We wanted a church where we believed the Scriptures were honored and Christ was present, and we suspected that hardly anyone else had this at all.  Perhaps my experience of how I viewed other churches than those within my way of perspective can illustrate something of the problem John Armstrong sought to address when he wrote Your Church is too small in 2010; available from Zondervan Press.

            John compares how Jesus prayed for Christian unity as expressed in John 17 with how most of us view the church situation in the beginnings of our twenty-first century.  My 1980 perspective is an example of someone who had a too small view of the church.  If other Christians did not meet expectations of my perspective regarding Christianity then they were suspect in their Christianity.  People who believed like me tended to congregate together and when we gathered together we thought most others knew little of the Gospel.  But I wonder how many Christians in other churches were looking back at my church with a similar sort of wondering if we knew anything at all of the Gospel.  The problem of a lack of unity among Christians and among the churches is like a dangerous cancer that is morphing in our bodies, eating away at what remains healthy in our bodies while the sickness spreads and affects our entire organism.  Our lack of unity leads us to question the diversity of the Greater Church that is larger than our perspectives and larger than our vision. 

Our local churches can easily become places where sub-cultures built on particular ideals, practices, personalities, traditions and worship styles become marketed as the superior form of Christianity.  Instead of diverse ministries being seen as complimentary to one another they are seen as threats and competition to our particular church for which we have a sense of calling that we can’t imagine having for these other churches which do not believe, practice, or worship in the way we do.  No wonder we end up distrusting everything else around us once we have determined where we belong.

            There is an awareness that the present church situation in a world with literally thousands of denominations is not anywhere close to being as it should be.  Sarah Thebarge wrote a wonderful blog entitled “Not blue is not a color” asking readers for comments about how church could be done better.  It is one of my favorites, because of the beautiful and sensitive way she treats the problem of the dysfunctional church of our generation.  Hundreds of blogs seek to express the same message.  I think most of us realize the church of today is not living up to the expectations of Christ.

            I believe that John has written a book that helps us begin to address our situation.  In 1980 I had a view of the church that was too small.  How many of us have thought of the church along the lines of our particular brand of Christianity and then distrusted anything that didn’t line up to our particular perspective or tribe within Christendom?  Perhaps the best way to understand the church of today is that like ancient Israel our unity has broken down and we have become an Israel characterized by rival tribes.  In the instance of ancient Israel the divisions of the varied tribes paved the pathway for invading tribes outside of the faith to take Israel piecemeal a tribe or two at a time.  Syria took the tribes east of the Jordan River.  Assyria took the northern tribes.  Babylon took what was left.  Is that what is happening to Christianity today?  In the ancient days there were twelve tribes of Israel.  In our day there are literally thousands of Christian denominations.

            The reality that we have tribes and denominations within the greater Church of our Lord Jesus Christ isn’t as much what concerns John as the fact that we have a disunity among the tribes that has caused us no longer to watch out for one another’s interests.  If one church denomination has a problem it doesn’t matter to us because they are of “those people.”  We imagine ourselves immune to what wounds others in the battle with sinful issues and hold ourselves up as examples of a better way until the plague comes to our tribe.  We find it all too easy to look at another tribe and say what do we have to do with the house of the Anglican, the Baptist, the Charismatic, the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Evangelical, the Conservative, the Progressive, the Complimentarian, or the Feminist Christian?  We are sure of our little church perspective but not sure of all the others in the world of Christendom.  But the truth is that everyone else looking at our little tribe is wondering about us from their perspective.  Consequently we are treated as legion rather than as one in Christ, and worse still we treat each other as legion rather than as one in Christ.

            John Armstrong has seen and been impacted by this scenario.  He has understood that Christ prayed for a different church experience for all of us when he prayed his priestly intercessory prayer found in John 17.  He recognizes that we have to work through the issues upon which we disagree.  Sometimes one person is right and another is wrong about an issue, so there will be issues.  But sometimes the person who is right in his doctrine can be arrogant and the person who is wrong can sincerely love Christ and love the brethren; and at this point the one who may be right about the thing is less right before our Lord than the person who might be in error regarding what they believe.  In a united church the tendency would be to encourage the arrogant to humility and to encourage in a winsome manner the one who is in error to consider certain truths and considerations.  But in a divided church if the division is between members from two different tribes then each member generally goes on in the way of their particular tribe.

            John’s book is written with a desire to help us realize that Jesus Christ in his High Priestly prayer of intercession remembered for us in John 17 prays for our unity in Him before the Father and by the Spirit.  John has worked tirelessly to encourage us to build bridges to a church larger than our tribal divisions.  He has worked to do so with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Charismatic, Progressive and Conservative brethren with all sorts of differing church practices and doctrinal stances.  This is not a simplistic theoretically written wish it were like this book.  This is a book written by a man whose life is characterized in building bridges between the varied Christian tribes.  I haven’t given many of the examples of his recommendation partly because I am overwhelmed at where I would start.  I have instead described why I needed to be influenced by John’s perspective expressed in this book.  So I would like to encourage you to read this book.  You can also read about more of his work in this needed area of building Christian unity on his Acts 3 Network Ministry blog.  You probably won’t always agree with him, but he understands that.  In fact he understands that is part of why listening to one another, praying for one another, and seeking to build bridges to one another is so important for us all.  It is not enough to dismiss someone because they think differently than we do.  That is just a bit of evidence that maybe our church is too small.