Connected: A Reluctant Case for the Necessity of the Church

By Robert G. Moss

Concurring with many who find the church pointless if not downright harmful, this book explains why the church should nonetheless exist. Weaving together resources from Scripture, science, history, and theology, Moss describes the drastic and systemic changes that must take place if the church is to have any hope of fulfilling its purpose: revealing God's peace, compassion, love, and justice in the world. Even if we are willing to undertake it, the transition from the church we are comfortable with to the church we need to be will no doubt be difficult, painful, and anxiety ridden. Nonetheless, this book claims that the church is still the best option available for the re-creation of the world.
Well-researched, easily readable, and presented with light humor, this book is sound enough for the classroom and practical enough for the congregation. Each chapter includes reflective discussion questions to aid the reader in rethinking how their corner of the church can live into its core purpose, offering divine hope to a world that is desperately searching for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385206124

Robert G. Moss

Robert G. Moss currently serves as an intentional interim pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, specializing in transition and renewal. He is the author of The Neighborhood Church (2014).

Book preview

Introduction

The original working title for this book was Despite All Evidence to the Contrary by Virtually Everyone Everywhere, the Church May Not Completely Suck. I chose not to use it, primarily because it’s too long. There may be more legitimate literary reasons, but that title does come very close to conveying my intent in writing this. The church as we know it in America is broken. It has been for a long time. So long, in fact, that we generally consider this broken state to be normal, the way it always was, and the way it was meant to be. Our culture and, if I may be so bold, God are telling us otherwise. It’s trendy these days to call for the demise of the church, and thousands more are abandoning it every week if they were ever part of it at all. I find it hard to blame them. Who wants to be part of an institution that sustains itself largely through judgment and self-righteousness? For an organization purporting to be about love, grace, and compassion in the name of Jesus, the church has missed the mark in countless ways. And yet . . .

Concurring with many who find the church pointless, if not downright harmful, this book is my attempt to explain why it should nonetheless exist. Despite a growing number of Americans disregarding the church, its life is just as critical to the world in this moment as it has ever been. Not in its present form, certainly, but it must exist. To fulfill its purpose, there are drastic and systemic changes that must take place, and, to be honest, I’m not sure the church is up for that. While in this book I will try to validate the need for the church, I am not entirely optimistic that the church as we know it will ever get there.

The Christian church’s foundational identity was simply people who followed the way of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, its adherents were first referred to as people of the Way. Since then, it has been articulated as the universal body of Christ, the one holy catholic and apostolic church, as expressed in the Nicene Creed.¹ The apostle Paul tried to convey what he meant by the church when he wrote, Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread (1 Corinthians 10:17). Perhaps because that is rather hard to grasp, he tried again: For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another (Romans 12:4–5). Apparently from its beginning the church has had something to do with community gathered for a purpose. At least Paul thought so.

About fifteen centuries later, Martin Luther tried his hand at defining the church. He wrote about it as a community centered on what he referred to as true faith and gathered by the Holy Spirit:

I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with [the Spirit’s] gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as [the Spirit] calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith.²

It’s likely that throughout its existence people have always thought they understood what the church is and why it is. I’m not sure there’s ever been full agreement on it. Still today there are debates raging across church lines about what is required for one to be part of the Christian church. Can one be part of the body if one isn’t baptized correctly (or at all)? Or if one questions the virgin birth of Jesus? Or doubts the factual, historic truth of Christ’s miracles as recorded in the Gospels? Or isn’t convinced of the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead? Can someone be part of the church if they feel a need to cross their fingers when reciting parts of the Apostles’ Creed on Sunday morning?

For most of Christian history, the church has thought of itself as a particular institution that adheres to certain beliefs and doctrines that promote a lifestyle pleasing to God and assure its members of eternal life in heaven. Something along those lines, anyway. Belong to the church, go to heaven when you die. There have been various iterations of this theme, but it usually falls somewhere in that vicinity. Ultimately, the church itself has declared who is visibly in and who is out, and therefore who is guaranteed to live in joy and happiness forever and, not coincidentally, who will suffer in eternal agony. That’s a lot of power. It’s also a lot of bunk. It really has very little, if anything, to do with the actual identity of the church.

The church described in this book is not merely a gathering of the faithful, not a collection of individuals who believe certain things, nor is it those who live a subjectively approved lifestyle. Yet for the purposes of this book, we need to articulate some boundaries, as perforated as they may (and ought to) be, around who and what is the church.

Within these chapters, the definition of the church I will be using hearkens back to its origins: the community claiming to follow Jesus of Nazareth. Notice this definition doesn’t mention any particular beliefs, and therefore may cut a larger swath than some find comfortable. If so, you may be one for whom this book can be beneficial. The goal is not consensus, as the church has no hope of ever agreeing on what the qualifications are, how to fulfill its purpose perfectly, or, for that matter, what its purpose is. The church does, however, have an obligation to be who it is and persevere in its purpose, which originally centered on recognizing and living out the church’s loving connection to God, to one another, and to the rest of creation, all in the name of Jesus.

I do not take on this task lightly or write about it casually. I created an outline for this book several years ago. Occasionally I would look at it, edit it, expand it, rearrange it, and delete portions of it. As I continued to wrestle with the concepts being presented in the following chapters, I have repeatedly weighed them against my upbringing in the Roman Catholic Church, my own personal and pastoral experience, Christian history, my current Lutheran identity, long years of study (of Scripture and other sources), a deepening and evolving spiritual awareness, and a perceived understanding of the role and purpose of the church—informed both by those on the inside and those on the outside.

The diversity present among Christians and Christianity is a gift, but I won’t necessarily seek audience from across that entire spectrum. Though the premises of this volume may be applicable to the entirety of the church, this book is an address primarily to the mainline church. Not because mainlines are more problematic, but the mainline church is the language and the praxis with which I’m most familiar. Others can write about the obvious need for reform within evangelical and fundamentalist traditions, but I’ll leave that to them. This volume, then, will be part memoir, part theological treatise, and part plea for mainline adherents and officials, congregations, and denominations to acknowledge that we are not the church God envisions nor what the world needs. We must reclaim our core identity: the body of Christ, the community seeking to be blown by the wind of the Spirit of God, the movement launched to follow the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth for the sake of the world.

Even if we could ever come to some sort of agreement on the church’s identity, there’s still the issue of why the church exists. What is its mission? Most of us have always assumed it has something to do with hellfire insurance, making sure we and our loved ones live eternally in heaven with God. Using my most precise theological terminology, that’s a load of garbage. Simply stated, I am convinced that by following the path of Christ, the church is in existence to reveal and participate in a divine vision for the world, a more divine way of living with one another and the rest of creation. The case I’ll make in this book is that this is, in fact, the default setting for all of creation, us included. This purpose can only be enacted through creative connection, love, and empathy. When the church lives out its purpose in following Christ, it will be willing to give up its own life to embrace suffering, willing to lose its self-righteous dignity to joust with the windmills of abusive power, and willing to abandon its elitist pride to recognize its home has always been its connection to the humble. If we believe anything about the life and teachings of Jesus at all, it’s that our bond with Christ and the world is where hope for the world can be made real.

The assertion presented here is that the mainline church is not only best positioned to reveal this alternate reality but was created solely for that purpose. No other organization, entity, group, or clan has the capacity at its deepest core to live this out in the face of an individualized, polarized, power-seeking, and violent culture. Once again, this is our time. As weak, self-absorbed, entitled, and resistant as we are, the church was built for this very thing. All odds are stacked against it, yet the church may still show the most visible hope for the world. It took a long time for me to move beyond my own cynicism to be opened to this. I share this journey in the hope that you may be opened to it as well. And who knows after that?

There were many years when I wasn’t sure there was a legitimate way for me to justify the continued existence of the church. Again and again, I witnessed a body of backward-looking, self-indulgent people who claimed the name of Christ but clamored more for power and their own justification than anything resembling the life and teachings of Jesus. I watched denominations, congregations, and ordained church leaders concerned with sav[ing] their life rather than los[ing] their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel (Mark 8:35). A common thread running through most of the history of the church has tied it more to corrupt systems of power and influence than to identification with the brokenness of the world. Even during the recent worldwide COVID pandemic, congregations exhibited more concern about opening their inner sanctuary doors to appease their own people than with sacrificial love for their suffering neighbors. In its concern for its own survival, the church has fallen into utilizing the same political motives that have been tearing at the very fabric of the United States and other Western countries. Struggling for generational relevance, the church has successfully taught its doctrines to our youth, only to discover that the knowledge of these doctrines didn’t have the effect we were hoping for. We have handed down our faith, but the faith we embraced appears incapable of carrying the current weight of our difficult and complex lives. Any attempts at reexamining our identity and purpose have only served to agitate the faithful, who have come to believe that preserving the traditions that have been passed down would somehow save us, bring young households into the fold, save the church, and turn the world around.

It seems at times that the only difference between