Close Your Church for Good, Chap 3, Sec 7. This is the concluding section in a chapter called “Your Church Must Die.” So far we have seen that the church seeks honor and glory, but in all the wrong places. This final section in the chapter shows how Jesus, through His incarnation gained glory, and how we can too.

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Incarnation within a dying world also requires identification with the world in its pain, fear, rejection, sorrow, and ultimately, death. There is no truly human existence without such things. Therefore, a desire to be incarnational requires a headlong race toward death. However, embracing pain and death takes vision.

Many churches talk about vision casting, and this generally means envisioning how big and influential the church can be in ten or twenty years, and then deciding what steps need to be taken to get there. While it is true that “Without vision, the people perish” it is also true that the wrong vision leads the people astray. The vision of most churches focuses on imagining a glorious future where they grow and expand their ministries, programs, building size, and Sunday attendance. Maybe the church needs a new vision—the vision of Jesus.

The vision of Jesus for His earthly ministry can be summarized in one word: death. What was the way forward for Jesus? It was away from glory, away from riches, away from honor and fame. From very early in His ministry, Jesus began talking about His death as the reason why He came.

Of course, it must be recognized that the death of Jesus was not the end of the Incarnation, but the ultimate expression of it. It was in the death, the shame, the horror, and the pain of the cross that Jesus revealed another aspect of the character of God. Jesus revealed that God is a God who dies for the sake of others.

And so death was not the end, either of Jesus or the Incarnation. It was just the beginning. After three days, Jesus rose from death, and after appearing to and encouraging many of His followers, ascended into heaven and was glorified to the right hand of God the Father. This also was part of the incarnation.

The church sees the glory of the resurrected Savior, and cries out, “Yes! That is what we want! That is our vision! May the glory of God cover the earth in and through the church!” But we have forgotten that glory for Jesus only followed humiliation and death. And so it will be for the church. To go forward to glory, we must go back to death. To reach glory, we must die. Like Jesus, we must spread out our arms in victorious defeat, let out a trembling sigh, and utter those words which make the devil shudder to this very day: “It is finished.” Only then, once we die, can we hope for resurrection.

So remove your life support. Turn off the iron lung. Pull the plug. Your church must die. 

Close Your Church for Good. Chap 3, Part 5. How can the church spread the message of the Kingdom? The same way Jesus did.

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The church is commissioned to continue the Incarnation, the way of death, the way of humility, the way of self-sacrificing service. But it seems that, like Jonah fleeing to Tarshish, we have all too often gone in exactly the opposite direction. Rather than running headlong toward humility, suffering, self-sacrifice, service, and even death, we have raced toward power, prominence, self-gratification, and self-advancement. We have adopted the methods of imperial governments, military powers, and greedy corporations.

There are long explanations from history and psychology about why we have done this, but the real culprit is theological: we’re sinners with the best of intentions. We see the influence of imperial government, and we imagine all the good that could be done if such power could be harnessed for the church. We see the evils that military power can destroy (while ignoring all the evils it creates), and believe that similar tactics could be used to advance the cause of Christ. We watch the throngs flood through the doors of amusement parks and department stores and think that if we can get such crowds to buy our wares and attend our concerts, they might be unaware when we throw the Gospel into their cart as well, as if it were some blue-light special Christmas candy on December 26th.

The world notices these attempts to copy, and they are not impressed. They hear our message of incarnation, but our methods look more like a used-car salesman in “Car Nation.” Worldly methods do not help in spreading the Kingdom message. The two are incompatible. And the world sees right through it all. They hear a message of peace, love, and service, but see methods of greed, power, and glory. Understandably, they get confused. The methods and message don’t mix, and the world knows it!

The church needs to be incarnational in the same way that Jesus was. We need to represent God to the world, but in such a way that we are as close to human as possible without crossing into sin. This describes the incarnation of Jesus. He became so fully human that people had (and still have) trouble believing He was God. Similarly, the incarnational church must enter so fully into the world, and become so much like the world, that many may have trouble seeing how we are different.