Of Yard Signs and Yearnings

Photo by Paul Kapischka on Unsplash

Not long ago I was visiting a small town in the Midwest. During my Sunday morning prayer walk, I noticed a plethora of yard signs around town, most of which were not, surprisingly, related to politics. There was the usual propaganda for plumbers and roofers and real estate agents, but by far the predominant theme of those signs was church advertising. What follows is not a commentary on any of the particular congregations represented on those signs nor on the folks in whose yards they were planted. This is simply a reflection prompted by the very visible presence of those signs in that village. In truth, I think those signs captured my attention mainly because I was already in an extended season of pondering the nature of the local church.

As I started to pay closer attention to the ecclesial advertisements, a couple patterns emerged. First, those signs were not framed as invitations to enter into a relationship with Jesus as part of a Jesus-shaped community. Their purpose was to woo believers into niches or comfort zones or particular affinities. Have kids? Go here! Want a certain kind of preaching? Go there! Just can’t worship without a particular style of music? Check out this church! Second, every single one of those signs pointed people to churches outside that community. This is a village that has three traditional churches (that is, long-established congregations with church buildings), at least one newer store front church, and, I suspect, a couple of house churches. And yet, a large number of Christian residents of this town were not only driving dozens of miles outside their community to attend church, but urging their neighbors to do so as well.

As I walked, I wondered about the implicit theology and ecclesiology that might lie behind this yard sign phenomenon. Three aspects stand out and raise questions that are worthy of deeper reflection: church as commodity, church as event, and church as an entity dislocated from community. First, what does it mean when we choose a church like we choose any other consumer commodity—based on personal preferences and perceived acquired value? If “church” is just another product over which I as consumer exercise the right to choose according to my good pleasure, what are the implications for what I really believe, both about the Lord of the Church and about the reasons for the local church’s existence?

Second, what does it mean when church is primarily or even exclusively something you attend? If church is primarily an event, like a concert or a ballgame, then participants are few, spectators are many, and the commitment required is minimal. This ecclesiological distortion has deep and far-ranging implications for evangelism and discipleship. If church is an event, then “yard sign-ing” can legitimately take the place of person-to-person “gospel-ing.” If all that is required is being a spectator, then occasional attendance easily replaces the demands of discipleship. Neither Jesus nor the New Testament writers, however, would recognize attendance at a weekly event (even perfect attendance!) as a synonym for being a disciple. For example, how does “attending church” compare with what Jesus had to say about discipleship in Mark 8:34–38 or Luke 14:25–35, or with the portrait of believers in the letter written by Jesus’ brother James? And what about Romans 12:1, where our easy phrase, “worship service,” is confronted and turned on its head by Paul’s call to a “service of worship” that involves the presentation of our whole selves as living sacrifices? This is a particularly pressing set of questions for Wesleyans, given the rich and robust heritage of intentional and costly discipleship that is at the heart of our tradition.

Third, and probably determinative of the first two factors, what does it mean when church is dislocated from community, that is, not embedded in a local context, not significantly present in a particular neighborhood? What happens when people live, work, go to school, participate in sports, shop, and generally “do life” in one neighborhood or community—but choose to “go to church” in a different place? One thing is certain, that kind of consumer-driven selectivity is only possible in a context of affluence, where one has the option and the means to drive dozens of miles outside one’s neighborhood to attend “the church of my choice.” This is a phenomenon that would be incomprehensible to Christians in many places in the world, and certainly does not reflect the pattern of New Testament Christianity. In some cases, there are probably very good and perhaps even missional reasons for these choices, but I think the widespread replication of this pattern in the North American context should provoke us to ask some hard questions. When believers “dislocate” from their communities and neighborhoods in order to congregate elsewhere, how does that impact those communities and neighborhoods? And what does it do to the church?

These three sets of questions won’t be answered most effectively in theory or in the context of individual, private reflection—and they probably won’t be answered neatly, painlessly, or in a one-size-fits-all manner. These are questions to be addressed in community, guided by vigorous and rigorous engagement with Scripture under the direction of the Holy Spirit. I hope that rich and honest conversations will be spurred as both existing congregations and teams of new church planters grapple with these issues.

Those yard signs and the questions they generated have prompted continued thinking about the nature of New Testament congregations. What were they like? How did the New Testament writers describe their identity and their purpose, and how do those descriptions speak to our questions? Over the past few months of daily engagement with Scripture, three aspects of the New Testament portrait of local churches have stood out to me. There’s obviously a lot more to say about the nature of the church, but these are the three things that the Spirit has been highlighting for me during this season. The congregations reflected in the New Testament writings were small and local, but connected to larger networks; they were messily diverse; and they had a significant and costly impact in the cities, towns, and neighborhoods where they were located.

Probably most, if not all, of the New Testament churches were small enough to meet in homes or places of business. Using social-scientific methods to analyze archaeological evidence from Greco-Roman culture, Peter Oakes (Empire, Economics, and the New Testament) has argued extensively that the average size of the first-century congregation was probably around 40 people, perhaps slightly larger if hosted in the home of someone from the wealthy elite class. In the letters of the New Testament we hear frequent references to “the church that meets in the house of so and so” (e.g., Prisca and Aquila, Rom. 16:3–5; Philemon and his family, Phlm. 2). So these were small, local groups, but rather than existing in independent isolation, they were connected to larger, regional networks of churches. Think, for example, of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2–3, where Jesus addresses each congregation individually but clearly expects that the other six will hear the message as well. The unifying refrain of the seven letters is, “Let anyone who has ears to hear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” In Colossians 4:15–16, Paul explicitly instructs the Colossian and Laodicean congregations to share their letters with each other. For congregations who currently find themselves in a season of imagining their next steps and making decisions about their future affiliation (or lack of it), this aspect of the New Testament churches may be one of the strongest arguments for vibrant local churches to remain connected to a denomination rather than pursuing independence, as glorious as that may sound to American ears. A recent article by Jay Therrell, president of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, speaks well to this matter.

A second characteristic of local churches in the New Testament is their messy diversity. A great deal of the apostolic instruction in the epistles is directed to helping local congregations navigate the unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcome heterogeneity—ethnic, social, cultural—into which their new identity in Christ has drawn them. When Paul tells the Jewish and Gentile Christians in Ephesus that Christ has “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility” between them (Eph. 2:14), it isn’t a soft metaphor. The existing divisions—present everywhere outside of their unity in Christ—were real and charged with centuries of bilateral hostility. When he reminds the Galatians that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female,” Paul acknowledges the very real social and cultural factors that separate people outside the church. And James’ hard-hitting words about favoritism and wealth recognize that in Christ people of very different socio-economic realities have been brought together (James 2:1–7). When these kinds of pre-existing differences come together, it gets messy! The tensions that arise out of such disorderly and disorienting diversity can push people to seek the easier comfort of homogeneity. But the apostles were insistent—there was to be no separation into “niche Christianity”; rather a characteristic of these local congregations would be the long-haul commitment to the hard work of living out the unity that Christ’s work on the cross had achieved. Together they would “work out their salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12); together they would shine like stars in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation (Phil. 2:15).

These small groups of Jesus’ followers, working out their salvation and sanctification together and living out the utterly counter-cultural unity-in-diversity empowered by the Spirit, did not go unnoticed in the communities where they gathered. The pressures faced by Christian groups in the first century was due less to some kind of organized, state-run persecution campaign and more to local resistance that arose in the neighborhoods, towns, and cities where these small churches were living out a visible display of “a new way of being human” (N.T. Wright). It is precisely because these messily diverse little groups were a living testimony to the transforming power of the risen Jesus in Smyrna and Corinth and Pergamum and Antioch that opposition arose among those who felt the ground of “status quo” shifting beneath their feet. It is precisely because these small but determined congregations fed the hungry, cared for the widows and orphans, lived honorably, and loved fiercely in the name of Jesus that they had an impact on Philadelphia and Cenchreae and Ephesus and Philippi. It’s important to note, however, that while their life together and their impact was local, it was never insular—these small congregations regularly sent out members and key leaders as part of the apostolic mission to establish new Christian communities in other locations (cf. Romans 16).

This is a season when many in the pan-Wesleyan world are re-thinking just what “church” means and yearning for a new way of “being church.” May we be fiercely committed to the development of congregations that are messily diverse, locally impactful, and missionally driven, for the sake of the world that is our parish.

Dr. Rachel Coleman lives in Elida, Ohio. She is an adjunct instructor and course writer (Biblical Studies) for Indiana Wesleyan University, Bethel University, Asbury Theological Seminary, and United Theological Seminary, and serves as a regional theological education consultant (Latin America) for One Mission Society. Rachel blogs at writepraylove660813036.wordpress.com.