Unearth the Church: Exposing Foundations and Exorcising Selfishness

By Johnmark Camenga

There are many ways in which the Church has missed the mark set for it by Jesus--that it would love God and neighbor and that it would preach, teach, and serve. In missing the mark, the Church has caused harm, often to the very people that Jesus called the Church to love and serve. This is a challenge to the Church to be honest about who and what it has become. This is a call to the Church to confess its selfishness and preferences and how they have led it to be of service to itself at the expense of everyone else. This is an effort to own the harm that we, the Church, have caused. This is an attempt at entering into a conversation with the people who have been harmed or left behind by the Church. If the Church is to be effective in the work Jesus has given it to do, the Church must repent of its selfishness, seek forgiveness for the harm it has caused, and be rebuilt on the foundation that Jesus laid out. That cannot happen until we Unearth the Church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Mar 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666788198

Johnmark Camenga

Johnmark Camenga is a pastor and a chaplain in Harrison County, West Virginia. He previously spent seven years working as a house parent with children in residential care. Johnmark and his wife Cathy have been married since 2000 and their triplets (Cate, Eve, and Jonah) were born in 2007. His ministry is focused on meeting people in their grief and challenging people and the Church to build their lives on Jesus.

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Introduction

Many people who were once active members of churches, faithful attendees of churches, or simply church-adjacent in their day-to-day lives have decided they are done with the church. If you’ve been in attendance at any church recently, this reality is hard to miss. Pews and parking lots are far emptier than they used to be. Why is this happening?

There have been plenty of articles and books written about the degradation of culture. Podcast after podcast and sermon after sermon decry the crumbling of this moral and the downplaying of that ethic. The church has often been all too eager to latch onto those narratives, claiming that their emptying parking lots and sanctuaries are symptoms of societal illness.

This is the it’s not me, it’s you approach. It is an approach that is rooted in defensiveness and accusation. This approach is just as insulting as it is lazy.

We need to do better.

Instead of taking the easy, blame-game approach, what would happen if the church took a critical glance in the mirror?

When something is unearthed, it is uncovered and exposed. This can be an exciting prospect when it comes to archaeological digs and the discovery of artifacts from ancient civilizations or the skeletal remains of dinosaurs. Seeing those bits of history and speculating what they reveal about people and animals in the past can be an enlightening experience. It is fascinating just how much truth and history is hidden by centuries of dirt and debris.

To unearth the church is similar in some regards. It is a process of digging below the surface to discover what is hiding down there. The discoveries made along the way can be enlightening and fascinating, but they can also be challenging and humbling. In the same way that an archaeological dig often opens the eyes and minds of the researchers to new possibilities about the past and their implications on the present, so too this process of unearthing the church can open our eyes, forcing us to rethink the narratives we’ve adopted about how we’ve gotten to where we are.

In Matt 21:12–14 we read one of the accounts of Jesus clearing out the temple in Jerusalem. There were merchants set up on the temple grounds, selling animals for sacrifice at premium prices, turning sacrifice into commerce, and essentially making the temple grounds into a tourist trap. Jesus had just arrived in Jerusalem with crowds welcoming him and cheering his arrival. They called out to him, Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! He was identified by the crowds as a son of King David, as one who came in the name of God, and as a prophet (Matt 21:11).

Immediately after the triumphal entry, Jesus went to the temple. Upon his arrival on the temple grounds, Jesus was moved to anger over what he witnessed. What he saw was people seeking to demonstrate their devotion to God being taken advantage of by merchants and money changers who were motivated more by profit than they were by honoring God. Acting with the authority of God, the power of a king, and the honesty of a prophet, Jesus threw everyone out. This expulsion of the merchants and money changers is accentuated by this phrase from Jesus: It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers (Matt 21:13).

If this is how the story ends, it is already astounding. Jesus using his authority as the Son of God to chase the profiteers away is unexpected while at the same time being fully in line with what Jesus’ ministry is all about. But what happens after Jesus clears the temple grounds makes clear for us just why Jesus did what he did. As soon as Jesus ran everyone off, Matt 21:14 says that the blind and the lame came to him in the Temple, and he healed them.

In order for the temple grounds to be a place where the work of the Lord could be done, Jesus had to get rid of what was getting in the way. The presence of the money changers and merchants and all those who were there to buy and sell—even the presence of the priests and the scribes—served as a deterrent to those who truly wanted to be near God. The religious elites with their ease-of-access to the temple and to the trappings of religious expression had lost sight of why they were there while those who sat on the fringes were acutely aware of their need for God.

This is why we need to unearth the church: when the church makes room for selfishness and human tradition, it does so to the exclusion of both Jesus and those Jesus calls it to serve. When the church rejects self-reflection and Holy Spirit conviction, preferring to point fingers at societal ills as the reason it is struggling, it closes itself off from Jesus and it makes itself unapproachable. When the church refuses to be unearthed, it is refusing to meet the needs of those who are most aware of their needs.

You may have noticed the bulldozer in the cover art for this book. If you have ever watched a skilled operator at work, you’ll know both the power and precision they bring to the table with those enormous machines. It can be a brutal and a beautiful thing to watch as they come in and remove everything that needs to be removed and nothing that does not, leaving behind an environment prepared for the next phase.

Brutal and beautiful.

In the work of unearthing the church, both of those descriptors hinge on perspective. Those who are desperate to cling to the selfish, human traditions they have tied to the church will find themselves on their back foot, defensive, and probably angry. The work of unearthing the church is unrelenting. It may seem brutal—savage, cruel, even inhumane—to those experiencing it. That makes sense. To have your preferred image of the church bulldozed and shoved off a cliff hurts. But, on the far side of that which feels brutal—if you hang in there to see what Jesus is doing—your perspective shifts and you are able to observe the beauty of what he’s done.

The beauty of freedom from selfishness and human traditions.

The beauty of not relying on yourself.

The beauty of a hope and a life and a church built only on the promises and commands of Jesus.

The beauty of a fresh start.

We are called to pursue just this sort of beauty regardless of the cost; regardless of what needs to be shoved off the cliff in the process.

This idea is implicit in the words of Jesus when he says things like, You have heard that it was said . . . but I say . . . (Matt 5:21–22, 27–28, and 31–32) or, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and  take up his cross and follow me (Matt 16:24). Jesus’ ministry is pitted against human tradition and selfishness. Jesus’ ministry encounters our way of living and forces us to really face what we are doing and why we are doing it. If these aspects of the work of Jesus were applicable to the temple era in which he lived, who do we think we are that they would not be applicable to the church era in which we live?

When I say unearth the church, then, there are two specific things I have in mind; two things that must happen to us. Our foundation must be exposed, and our selfishness must be exorcised.

Expose our Foundation

We need to discover what foundation we have built the church on. This requires that we expose our foundation. When we do that we will discover one of two things: one, that Jesus’ promises and commands are our foundation or, two, that Jesus’ promises and commands are not our foundation. There is no room for pride or defensiveness in this process; those were the reactions that the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had to his work and ministry. If pride and defensiveness are our reaction to the unearthing process, that makes the work of exposing our foundation very easy; that is, if pride and defensiveness are our reactions, Jesus is not our foundation.

Exorcise our Selfishness

With our foundation exposed, we must turn our attention to the stuff we’ve built on top of the foundation. What ideas, attitudes, and practices have we constructed and are they reflective of the foundation we are supposed to be building on? If we hope to be the church that Jesus founded, we must be built upon Jesus and we cannot be built with materials that Scripture does not endorse. When we identify a thought, word, or action that is not in keeping with Jesus as our foundation and Scripture as our guide, we have to drive it out.

Jesus is coming to take us home; however, if we do not want these two things—that our foundation would be exposed and that our selfishness would be exorcised—we should not expect that Jesus is going to want us when he returns. Said differently, if we are not people who desire ongoing reformation, then we are not the people—we are not the church—Jesus is looking for. These two things are an expression of the church’s present and future hope—that we would always be in the hands of our Savior, being molded into his likeness, put into action for the advancement of his kingdom, and finally retired into his eternal presence.

As the church undertakes the process of unearthing, there may be a temptation to look at it like a church-growth plan. If that is how you look at it, you are only doubling down on the error that has led the church to its need to be unearthed. Growth is a desirable outcome, but it cannot be the purpose or the focus of the church. If we place our focus on growth, we will miss the same thing the merchants and money changers missed: the people we are called to love and serve and lead to Jesus.

Focusing on growth turns the church into a storefront, Jesus into a packaged good, people into customers, and their presence into profit. This book, then, is not about church growth, it is about reformation. We unearth the church so that we become the church that Jesus calls us to be and so that we serve the people Jesus calls us to serve.

Who is this book for?

This book is for you. I know that sounds a little flippant but stick with me. Whoever you are—whether you are a member of a local church or you are someone who has walked away from the church for various reasons—this book is for you. With that said, whoever you are, this book is intended to accomplish different things in the hands of different people. Let me explain.

First, to the person who has walked away from the church, I am writing to you. Before I say anything else directly to you, I want you to hear this: you have been blamed and bad-mouthed and berated by the church for far too long. Your concerns haven’t been considered and your feelings haven’t been acknowledged let alone empathized with. I acknowledge the truth of these statements, I acknowledge that I have been part of the reason that you have walked away, and I apologize for myself and on behalf of the church as a whole. This book is for you. This book serves as recognition of the fact that you have legitimate complaints against the church and that we have been far too quick to dismiss you as a quitter or as a deconstructor and far too slow to be curious about your reasons for quitting and deconstructing. This book is an attempt to demonstrate that the church is listening to you, admitting our fault in your departure, and seeking to reconstruct the bridge that led you into the church to begin with.

In your hands, it is my hope that this book will accomplish the work of reconciliation.

My desire is that you would read this book and find in its pages evidence that the church