On Being the Mosaic We Are in Christ

I am on a mission—a communal mission, meant to address leaders, members, friends, and all standers-by in the Covenant Church that is my home—part of the body of Christ I love and serve.

Working recently through a six-week series on “Covenant Affirmations,” I was moved to re-discover that from earliest days our Covenant forebears thought of what was being formed in and through them as a movement. No doubt knowing themselves, as immigrants, to be pilgrims in this world was part of that. The reading of Scripture made abundantly clear to them that there was no lasting city for them on this earth, in Sweden or America. As believers in Christ they were, with the writer to the Hebrews, looking for another city wherever they lived, “a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

“Mission Friends” was what they first called themselves, believers in God by grace through faith, whose minds had been captured by Christ’s Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37-40) and motivated by his Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

There is a certain pulse in that sense of being a movement that needs recovering among us. Glorying in traditional things now accrued to the movement in earlier times can easily cause a deadness of soul—the losing of one’s focus on the grace that alone begets life, not to mention the dynamic of faith that should be propelling us forward. Programs and church as usual can and often have become threats to movement rather than expressions of it.

We dare not forget, however, that authentic Christian movement is profoundly rooted theologically and communally. Our forebears, though far less educated than we, were deeply rooted in the Lutheran faith of the State Church in which they had grown up and been catechized. And they were concerned about not only bringing others to Christ but training them to live thoughtfully and earnestly as Christians. David Nyvall, founder and first president of North Park College and Seminary (now University) once said that any movement worth its salt will be able to point to institutions it creates along the way that embody its faith and life, thus furthering the movement. We are, by our own confession, companions together in a sacred union created by God—a movement within the whole body of Christ—bound beyond ourselves and our local churches with the whole body of Christ to serve his will and mission.

Many who confess to being bored by such bonds, judging their church dead and irrelevant--are now assigning themselves uncritically to movements of someone else's making, assuming that mimicking our culture in the interest of reaching people--as many leaders are doing--is the only way to do church. Some, in fact, are not wanting to do church at all, throwing out any vestige of Christian tradition, assuming that cultural relevance today is what really matters. Our Lord himself cautioned against building on such shifting sands. That we build and where is important, but so is why we build and how.

The mission I believe we must serve if we are to remain a truly Christian movement lies in the communal understanding with which the Covenant began—free to be ourselves but not independent, bound in Christ to one another and not separated by conformities of our own making.

What really matters in sustaining a movement are not standards we personally set to initiate and measure progress, but our passion in jointly lauding—in worship, fellowship, institutional life, church building, mission, and benevolence--what C.J. Nyvall once called “that mutual filial condition to which we have been born from above.” We have always been at our best when we affirm what God intends his church to be—a living, vibrant, communal mosaic of believers joined in body and spirit to worship him and build up his body.

Jaroslav Pelikan had it right: traditionalisms of every kind are “the dead faith of the living.” But tradition, rightly understood and embodied, is “the living faith of the dead.” Lasting movements are neither created nor sustained by separated individuals and churches. They are brought forth and maintained by God in the hearts of believers in Christ who bind themselves to him and one another in Word, Scarament, devoted fellowship, and service by the power of his Spirit.