Reflections...

A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on Sunday 3rd August 2008 by Rev. Kwok Nai Wang. The scripture readings that day were Psalms 148 and I Corinthians 1:1-9.


One of the most serious problems of the Church to-day is that its members on the whole fall victims of their narrow and inadequate self-understanding of who they are as a body. In other words, we fail to comprehend on what is the Christian Church.

To the general public, the Christian Church is a religious organization, just like the Buddhist Association or the Islamic Society, and which does good things such as providing welfare for the needy and good education for their children. It also teaches people to be kind to each other.

For Christians, the Church probably means the church they attend. Other than that, Christians coming from different backgrounds have different ideas. For a Roman Catholic, the Church may mean an elegant building where the mass is celebrated; for an Anglican, a parish church (a church serving in a hunk of geography); for a Congregationist, a Christian organization; and for a Baptist, a Christian family, etc.

When Christians are asked why they go to church, they usually give the following answers: for spiritual comfort; for guidance; to hear a good sermon; to sing and to pray; or to meet friends or members of their extended families; etc. A good many Christians go to church because for better or worse it has become a habit for them.

All these are honest answers. But at the same time, they reflect the fact that most people, Christians included, do not understand what the Church is all about. From the answers cited above, we can deduce that people’s ideas of the Church is too narrow: that the church is “my church”, and that the church does good to me. It is also too shallow: that the church has been cut off from its roots. In brief, they lack an understanding that the church is both universal and historical.

In the winter of 1970, I undertook an exposure tour of four weeks in the West side of Chicago where the Ecumenical Institute had launched a community re-development project.

Basically this project attempted to work with the residents who were mostly black people and who lived in the 10-city blocks near the West Congress Parkway, not too far away from down-town Chicago, It was a notorious ghetto in the City of Chicago. Most housing and accomodations were in shambles. The streets were full of street sleepers, alcoholics and drug-addicts. The crime rate was rampant; the school drop-out rate very high. It was discovered that the problem behind all these problems was that most of the residents had a “victim image”. Their self-image was very low. Because of this low self-esteem, practically all felt that they had no hope in the future. So they gave up.

This may be the root problem of the Church including all local churches to-day. We have an inadequate image of the Church. Let me paraphrase Proverbs 29:18, “where there is no vision of the Church, the members go asunder”. This indeed is the case where so many churches to-day have fallen into the dungeons of endless internal conflicts and fights. So the most urgent task of the Church, KUC included, is to re-construct an ecclesiology or an idea of the Church, which is broad enough, relevant and rooted in history.

First, let us start with the word “Church” itself. The word Church comes from the Latin-German word “Kirche” which in turn comes from the Greek word “Kuriakos” or “kuriakon” which literally means that which belongs to the Lord (Kurios). So the Church belongs to God. It is God’s Church. It never is and never should be our own church. Neither is it purely a human institution.

In the whole Biblical tradition, God calls His people to be His servants, to serve Him and His entire creation. For instance, God chose Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt to be moded later as God’s chosen people, to be a light to all nations and to bring justice to all nations (Is 42:6; 49:6 etc.). God chose the Levites to serve the altar (or the centre of worship) (Leviticus). God chose David and the kings to serve God’s Law and commandments (I Kings 11:34). God chose prophets to serve God’s Word (hence, the classical prophets in the Old Testament often began their oracles or teachings by saying, “Thus saith the Lord” or “The Lord says…”) and so on.

This line of thinking is consistent in the New Testament as well. In the New Testament reading this morning, Paul clearly indicated that not only himself, but the Christians at Corinth, were called by God to be God’s partners in this world.

So the Church is not only God’s Church, but especially it is God’s servant in this world.

When I first arrived, I was told that KUC is just like a family: members are very closed to one another. This is fine, as a start. We must go to a higher level. From homo-centric (or human centred) to theo-centric (or God centred). For KUC, just as all the local churches, belongs to God. KUC is a servant of God in Hong Kong and beyond.

God’s Church consists of all people who have faith in God. God is not only my God or your God. As what the Psalm we read this morning described God is the God of the oikoumene (or the whole inhibited earth).

Given its small size, KUC is very likely the most international church on earth. Our Sunday worshippers come from at least a dozen nationalities. It is itself a world in miniature. It is an ideal place where we can learn to be tolerant, inclusive and embracing.

God is not only the God of the whole world, He is the God of all history as well. This is why in the Hebrew or Jewish thinking, “God is the God of their ancestors, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob” (Ex 3:15) so very important.

KUC is a church of some history. It was founded some 85 years ago in 1923 by a British missionary called Horace Johnston. Rev. Johnston was from the London Missionary Society (or LMS), one of the earliest missionary societies founded two centuries ago. LMS was congregational in background. Though KUC has become an interdenomitional church, its church order or polity is still pretty much congregational based. But let us not forget that God’s Church or to be precise the Church of Jesus Christ had a history of 2,000 years. We owe a great deal to Jesus’ disciples who founded the Jerusalem Church. Let us not forget, but instead embrace the tremendous gifts the Byzantine Church and the Latin Church bequeathed to us through the Orthodox Church as well as the Roman Catholic Church.

When I first arrived almost two years ago, one or two core members often told me not to change things, warning me that this was what KUC had been doing. I often wonder whether though this was only the way they were accustomed to do things? Who can interpret the best of KUC’s tradition? How is all this in line with the tradition of the Reformers or the early Protestants of the 16th century?

It is only human that we make all efforts to preserve our cozy fellowship. It is because however imperfect, it gives us a sense of security. But from the Bible and from the history of the Church, we know that it is always God’s will to call His people to turn things inside out. God calls His people to go out to His world and serve Him there, that is to serve His people in need. So an inward-looking church is never God’s Church. God’s Church is always outward looking.

Soon, KUC’s Council and Trustees will look seriously in reviewing the future direction of KUC. Concretely, the question is: what is the mission of KUC? For the past months, I have cautioned myself repeatedly and our ministerial group that we may want to go to a higher level or to dig deeper and ask the question what is God’s mission or the Missio Dei in the world to-day? As God’s Church, we do not have “our” mission. The mission of the Church is always God’s mission. As we read from Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians this morning, the Church is God’s partner. The Church should never be concerned to do its own thing. But instead, it must seek God’s will and fully participate in it.

Daily, we are bombarded with information that this world is in dire need. Just in the month of May, there was Typhoon Nargis which hit Myanmar; an earthquake measuring 8 in the Richter Scale in Central China; a dozen powerful tornadoes wiped through many towns in Central United States of America… These were natural disasters. But there are millions of people who also suffer as a result of poor governance.

God demands us to try our best to respond to all these human sufferings. We at KUC must stop all kinds of squabbles and bickering over trivial things and be together and answer God’s call.

As God’s Church, and as God’s servants in the world, every church must be reformed constantly. True to the reformed tradition, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) founded in 1983 (by a merger of the two major Presbyterian Churches in America – one in the North and the other in the South) adopted this as their motto: ecclesia reformata semper reformanda or in English the Church reformed, ever reforming. The Church needs to be renewed constantly if it wants to be a co-worker of God in this world.

The world is ever changing rapidly. The Church of yesterday cannot meet the challenges of the world to-day. A Church which does not want to change cannot serve the world relevantly.

From 1870 to 1970, many churches in Canada supported by the government financially had forcibly removed around 150,000 native children from their homes and put them in boarding schools far away. The aim was to try to eventually integrate the native Indians into the white “civilized” Canadian communities.

For the past 20 to 30 years, more and more information came to light. These children were often abused mentally, physically and sexually. Conditions in many of these boarding schools were so terrible that as many as half of the children died of tuberculosis. One leading Canadian academic labelled this as a cultural genocide. Consequently, the Canadian government had to pay HK$15 billion as a settlement with 90,000 school survivors in May 2006 which ended years of lawsuits. In the end of May this year, a truth and reconciliation commission has started to travel across the country and hold hearings on the abuses. Hopefully it will take five years to complete its work.

Churches in the past 2,000 years have committed many serious errors or even crimes against humanity. We must be vigilant about the mistakes the churches have made and are making. But the most devastating mistake churches throughout the centuries have committed was that they have made God’s Church to be their church. Instead of a church serving the world, they have made it to serve their own interests. Is this also the same mistake we have fallen into?

As a church, we must constantly ask for God’s forgiveness. We must all turn back to God: let KUC be truly God’s Church again!