In Times Like These: God's Occasional Reconfiguration of His Church

Greystone Conversations

Does God sometimes unravel the ordinary recognizable form of the Church in times of great suffering, weakness, or judgment in order to re-weave her strands into a new form? Is this because the Church derives her form from the Lord Jesus Christ--the Christ of history, that is, of suffering to glory, humiliation to exaltation, obedience to life? What would we do if we believed this? What should we do . . . now?

There are times in the Church’s life, informed by the story of Israel and ultimately of Israel’s Lord and ours, in which God pries away our gripping fingers from the conventional expectations we have accumulated about how the Church, ministerial training, and theological fellowship look. In these times, which may be times of judgment over our sin or of weakness for other providential reasons, the Church's core identity in Christ remains as a blessing of the Spirit, even as she is, as it were, reconstructed in a new form never completely identical with her previous iteration. This is the story of Church in many eras of her history and in many parts of the world, as historians of the Church have long know, and there is good reason to think it may be what we are experiencing now. In such a time, the faithfulness of the Church is quietly eloquent yet revolutionary, and faithfulness is its own act of resistance, for God’s providential and loving loosening of our hold on what will not remain exposes the firm grip we have by faith to those things that will endure. But this faithfulness requires a new, even rare kind of courage among Christians who appreciate not only the urgency of our reconsideration of how things are, but our sacrificial investment in how things should be.

To discuss these weighty things we are pleased to welcome back once again friend and minister of Word and sacrament, Pastor Jesse Crutchley, pastor of Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a PCA congregation in Millersville, MD, and member of Greystone’s ministerial council.