Join the plodding visionaries. Join a church.

One of the books I thoroughly enjoyed in 2009 and didn't get around to finish writing about is Why We Love the Church by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck. DeYoung is the pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, MI and Kluck is one of the people in the pews at URC, actually in this case yellow plastic chairs (see p. 189). This was a true 50/50 collaboration, with each guy writing alternating chapters. Kluck brings a more personal and funny side to his chapters (you can listen to an interview with him here), while DeYoung provides more of the theological and pastoral insight.

Like I said I enjoyed this book, but it didn't land on me with the force it would have five years ago. They were preaching to the choir with this reader. Another reason I enjoyed it was because the church that DeYoung and Kluck describe reminds me of my own church in some ways. I'm a member of a church which is struggling to stay Biblically faithful within a mainline Reformed denomination (the PCUSA). The church DeYoung pastors so well is in the same situation within the RCA. Their church is next to a college campus and my church is next to a college campus. In some of the anecdotes they tell I recognized the "real-ness" and eccentricity that's usually more apparent in older, smaller churches than the shiny new megasized ones. I love this bit from Kluck:

As I look around the room this morning, I see a great man with Lou Gehrig's disease, holding hands with his sweet wife. I see another couple, the husband just diagnosed with cancer that will probably take his life in six months or so. I see a weird military vet guy who fried his brain on drugs in Iraq, and who we follow out to the lobby when he goes to the bathroom because we're afraid for the safety of our kids. I see my father-in-law who has a degenerative brain disease that has destroyed his intellect and ability to communicate and will take his life before it's all said and done. (pp. 192-193)

This is not the community of happy endings that we think the church should look like, but "sometimes (often) the happy ending is in heaven, and the getting there is a really difficult but formative part of our sanctification." (p. 193)

Judging from the titles of recent books and literature, revolution is the need of the day within the church. The authors, especially DeYoung, interact with Barna and others who've written scores of books saying that church as we've known it is passé, irrelevant, and finished. Without glossing over real problems they propose a competing vision.

What we need are fewer revolutionaries and a few more plodding visionaries. That's my dream for the church—God's redeemed people holding tenaciously to a vision of godly obedience and God's glory, and pursuing that godliness and glory with relentless, often unnoticed, plodding consistency. (p. 222)

In other words we need fewer wannabe Bono's and more people like the "line worker at GM with four kids and a mortgage, who tithes to his church, sings in the praise team every week, serves on the school board, and supports a Christian relief agency and a few missionaries from his disposable income." Instead of "Christians ready to check out and overthrow. . . we need more Christians ready to check in and follow through." (p. 223) Lines like these made me want to stand up and cheer.

However, the book makes clear that this vision of the church involves a lot of the mundane, a lot of sameness, and even boredom. "But in all the smallness and sameness, God works—like the smallest seed in the garden growing to unbelievable heights, like beloved Tychicus, that faithful minister, delivering the mail and apostolic greetings (Eph. 6:21)." (pp. 224-225) We can't all be Paul, most of us will be more like the sidekicks mentioned in the footnotes, or not mentioned at all. DeYoung goes on to wonder if maybe the reason some are finding church boring and irrelevant is because the wonder of the gospel has been lost in the fog of moralism and/or social activism. Instead of giving up on the church how about discovering God's grace anew as an accountable member of a local, gospel-centered church? This book challenged me to renew my commitment to the plodding visionaries who are in it for the long haul.

Go to church this Sunday and worship there in spirit and truth, be patient with your leaders, rejoice when the gospel is faithfully proclaimed, bear with those who hurt you, and give people the benefit of the doubt. While you are there, sing like you mean it, say hi to the teenager no one notices, welcome the blue hairs and the nose-ringed, volunteer for the nursery once in a while. . . enjoy the Sundays that click for you, pray extra hard on the Sundays that don't and do not despise "the day of small things." (pp. 226-227, italics emphasis mine)

Quotes from DeYoung & Kluck, Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion (Moody, 2009)