Reflections...

A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on Sunday 2nd September 2007 by Rev. Kwok Nai Wang. The scripture readings that day were Deuteronomy 4:32-40 and Mark 12:28-34.


My heart is always on the future of the Church. Practically all my life has been devoted to the renewal of the Church. It is my conviction that the future of the Church lies with the renewal of local churches. For local churches are the basic units or the most concrete expressions of the Church. So after 35 years in the Christian ministry, I decided to retire from any salaried jobs and devote my energy and time to work with local church pastors as well as seminarians.

In working with local church pastors, for the past seven years, I heard incessantly all kinds of complaints. Most of the complaints have to do with the dominance of the lay leaders of their churches. They believed that they were tightly controlled by the elders or deacons or council members of their church and were not given enough space and time to develop their ministry. From what I heard, most of the local church pastors are in hopeless situations. All that remains for them to do is to make all efforts to keep their jobs. But please be assured that the complaints are also from the other direction – their pastors are lazy, too self-centred, keener to develop their own interests than to care for the needs of their congregation members… From all this, I have come to the conclusion that both sides have to share the blame. However the ministers, however their parishoners and vice versa.

But, I believe there is a more deep-seated problem in all this. Simply put: ministers and their parishoners do not share a common understanding about the body which they all belong. In other words, both ministers and laity alike fail to grasp what the Christian Church is all about.

In a way all of us do have some kind of idea about the Church. The problem is whatever our idea of the Church, it is both shallow and narrow. The root problem is that our image of the Church is simply inadequate?

In the winter of 1970, I was in the west-side of Chicago to observe how the Ecumenical Institute was at work in a slum area.

In those days, the west-side of Chicago probably was the poorest and deserted area in the city of Chicago. Most of the residents in that area were racially minority people. The school drop-out rate, the crime rate, the unemployment rate were all very high. Prices of the goods in its stores were exceptionally high. Many residents or to be precise street sleepers resorted to alcohol and drugs. According to one study, the fundamental problem of the people in the area was that most of them had the “victim image”. They believed the city as well as the nation have abandoned them. There was nothing they could do to improve on their situation. So the Ecumenical Institute at the time resolved to enhance the self-image of the residents especially of the youth as the top priority.

Likewise in order to renew the Church, we need to start from the basis, that is, to rediscover what is the Church? We should consider to build an ecclesiology which is broad and rooted in the bases of the Christian faith as our highest priority. Therefore, I suggest in the month of September, we explore together the identity, nature and purpose of the Church in my sermons.

To begin with, the English word “Church” comes from the German word “Kirche”. The word Kirche has its roots from the Greek word Kuriakos or kuriakon, which liberally means that which belongs to the Lord (Kurios). So the Christian Church belongs to God. It is God’s Church. How wrong we are when we say the Church as our church! Sadly, churches all over the world have become merely human institutions.

In the Hebrew Bible or our Old Testament, the equivalent word for Church is Qâhâl. It means an assembly of people for a military, religious or any other purpose. But in the Bible it refers specifically to a group of people or individuals chosen by God for a specific purpose. For instance, God chose Abraham to be a blessing to the nations; God chose Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, the land of slavery and bondage; chose the Levites to be priests to serve in God’s altar; chose David to be a King to serve God’s commandments (I Kings 11:34); chose the Prophets to be the ministers of God’s Word (therefore oftentimes the prophets started their oracles by saying, “The Lord says…”); chose the Israelite people as God’s chosen so as to be a light to all nations or to bring justice to all corners of the world (c.f. the servant songs in II Isaiah). So these were the beginnings of the Christian Church. God chose people to join the Church for a particular purpose. Do we have this sense of God’s calling?

In the Greek Bible, qâhâl is translated as “ecclesia”. Ecclesia or the church appeared 112 times in our New Testament altogether: about 100 times in the Pauline letters, the Acts of Apostles and Revelation. Surprisingly it never appears in Mark, Luke, John, II Timothy, Titus, I Peter, II Peter, The First and Second Letters of John as well as Jude. In the Synoptic Gospels, it only appears in Matthew (once in 16:18 and twice in 18:17). But please be assured that it does not mean that “church” is not important in those books.

According to Paul Minear, my New Testament professor at Yale, there are about 100 ideas, concepts or images pointing to “Church” in the New Testament, such as the body of Christ, Christ’s servants, stewards entrusted with the mysteries of God (I Cor. 4:1), ambassadors of Christ (II Cor 5:20), to name just a few. In I Peter 2:9 alone there are four: “a chosen race, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people to be a personal possession to sing praises of God who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (NJB).

When we take time to study these 98 images of the Church carefully, we will find despite their rich and diversified meanings, there is one striking commonality, namely they are all theo-centred and not homo or human centred. The Church is of God, for God and by God. To put it in another way, the Church belongs to God. Inspired and guided by God, the Church participates in God’s activities in this world.

According to records, the earliest Christian Church, i.e. a Jewish community gathered by the Holy Spirit concentrated to do only two things: praised God and shared the faith as taught by Jesus Christ (c.f. Acts 2:42-47).

Soon, because of extremely rapid expansion, churches were already established throughout most of Europe, Middle and Near East, Northern Africa as well as India by the end of the 4th century. Leaders of the Church decided to organize: deacons were established (Acts 6:1-6); leaders of elders were also initiated (I Tim 3:1-13) and rigid doctrines were introduced (this explains why there were so many church councils in the first three centuries). Increasingly the Church had become institutionalized and hierarchical.

In this kind of situation, God was pushed above (That is why sometimes we address God as our father in heaven). God has become no more than a figure head. In other words God was only the God in name. The Pope and his curia, bishops and their priests in reality had become the authority of the Church. They are the Church. The Church belonged to them. In the Medieval Europe, Grand Cathedrals were built one after another. These big cathedrals were nominally for God’s glory; but in real terms they intended to show the power of the Bishop. A Cathedral is a bishop’s church, because it contains the cathedra or the bishop’s chair. The bishop’s chair is generally known as the bishop’s throne.

My wife and I took a cruise to Alaska in July. We had an opportunity to visit a small Russia town called Sikta. In the centre of this small town is a small Russian Orthodox Church of more than 150 years old. It is decorated very elaborately, full of precious icons. In the middle of the congregation, there is a beautiful chair, covered with red silk and with four golden legs. It is labeled clearly that it is the Bishop’s throne.

Immediately it brought me back the memories of the power and dominance of the Medieval Church in Europe. In those days the hierarchy was the Church. They were so influential that they actually dominated the political, economic and cultural scene in Europe. Historically, those 1,000 years, i.e. from about 500 to 1,500 A.D., were labeled as the Dark Ages.

Then came the Church Reformation in the 16th century. Church reformers like Martin Luther, Huldriech Zwingli, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin etc. besides criticized the corrupt practice of the church hierarchy at the time, they also advocated one very important point: the Absolute Sovereignty of God. In other words, God must be put back as the centre of the Church and of the world. The Church belongs to God.

In order to tone down the importance of the church hierarchy, the reformers also advocated two other important points. First, the Church was not defined by the hierarchy. Rather it was defined by its functions: where the Word of God is preached and the sacraments rightly administered, there is the church. Second, the church is not synonymous with the hierarchy. The church is composed of all believers. Some reformers went even further by advocating “Priesthood of all believers”.

What the reformers of the 16th century tried to enlighten us was what the church should be. The church is composed of all believers. Believers gather together with only one purpose, to lift their hearts to God (Te Deum). The church is not and should never be a pure human organization, directed by a few persons with their own agenda.

It has been 500 years since the Reformation of the Church initiated by Martin Luther’s 95 theses posted on the door of the castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. A great deal of things have happened in the world and also within the Church. In a way the forces of Securization of the 20th century have broken down many authoritarian hurdles. Definitely on the whole the Church is now less clergy-centred. But still we have to honestly ask ourselves: is the Church God-centred or pretty much constituted according to the wishes and interests, likes and dislikes of our members.

If the Church has any future, it must undergo a Second Radical Reformation. We must try our best to put God back in centre stage. The Church belong to God. It is God’s Church before it is our church.