This is the third in a series of posts on what I call ‘Elephants in the mission operations room’. These are large roadblocks standing on the Church’s road to effective mission, yet, because they are uncomfortable, people prefer to ignore and not talk about.
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‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ (Ephesians 6:12).
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It is now eighty years since the D Day landings on the beaches of Normandy in northwest France. This exercise has been described as the greatest invasion in history and was planned and executed to begin the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s evil Nazi regime. To achieve the successful defeat of the pernicious Nazi evil required the reallocation and pooling of the resources of many nations. Nothing less would have achieved that second World War victory. An example of the degree to which every possible resource was harnessed and reallocated is the Cunard ocean liner the Queen Mary.
The Queen Mary was a floating palace when it started to carry the exceedingly rich across the North Atlantic before World War II. It was fitted out in the most opulent and sumptuous manner, with the finest materials money could buy and staterooms fit for a king. Then came the war, and all resources had to be turned over to the war effort. The luxurious cruise liner was commandeered, stripped down, and converted into a troop carrier. Out went all the opulence. For example, the palatial beds in the staterooms were replaced by bunks, so the ship designed for just over 2,000 very rich and famous passengers was converted to carry 15,000 troops or more.
When a nation is at war, all resources are turned over to the war effort—if you want to win that is! For example, in Britain, the peacetime army was massively increased to a wartime size by conscription. There was no choice; apart from exceptional cases, every man was required to leave his peacetime life and join the fighting forces.
Additionally, factories were turned over to producing munitions, car factories to producing tanks, the Rolls Royce plants to the production of Spitfire engines, and so on. All available land, including sometimes bowling greens, tennis courts, even the strips alongside airport runways, was utilised for the growing of food, largely to replace that lost by the sinking of ships carrying food across the Atlantic. In terms of labour, women, previously largely home-keepers, were brought in to work in factories and on the land to replace the men away fighting.
In short, the nation was at war, and all of life was reorganized and disrupted in order to maximise the war effort. It was not a time for the comfortable life, and there were to be no passengers.
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The Bible makes it very clear that the Church, the body of Christ, is at war. In Ephesians 6:10–18, Paul exhorts Christians to equip themselves with the (spiritual) equipment of a soldier for the war with spiritual powers (vv. 11, 12). The Christian Church has an enemy, the Dragon (Satan), who is making war against the saints, those who are the (spiritual) offspring of Christ (Revelation 12:17). That’s why Timothy (as are we) is urged to wage the good warfare (1 Timothy 1:18).
However, in the Western Church, this topic seems to have become another ‘Elephant in the mission operations room’, indeed a case of ‘Don’t Mention the War!’ For while the Church is indeed engaged in a cosmic war, and in the West losing badly, attend most Sunday meetings and you’d never know it! Few church leaders ever mention to their congregations the big picture of decades-long declining attendances and loss of SALT (Matt. 5:13) i.e. Gospel influence) in society.
In general, the Church, while occasionally acknowledging that Christians are at war (mostly in some older hymns rather than sermons), seems to believe it can fight the war with something like a peacetime army, with everybody staying safe and comfortable at home, even as the statistics consistently show that we are losing badly. It’s a quaint idea for most congregational members to be told that when they became a Christian they were conscripted—they, themselves, and all their resources for the use of the King, their saviour and commander, in order to wage war against the spiritual forces currently creating carnage in Australian (Western) society, against what C.S. Lewis described as ‘That Hideous Strength’.
Garibaldi, the famous Italian military leader, is quoted as saying to potential recruits:
‘I do not offer pay, provisions, housing. No! I offer hunger, thirst, battles, and death. If you love your country-not just with your lips, follow me.’
He may have modelled his blunt statement on Jesus who in effect said, in paraphrase, similar things to would-be recruits (disciples):
‘I do not offer pay, provisions, housing, No! I offer hunger, thirst, battles, and death. If you love God-not just with your lips, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me’.
Congregational members may well happily sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, or at more contemporary services, ‘To Live Is Christ and to Die Is Gain’. However, anything remotely like fighting or being prepared to become uncomfortable let alone dying for Christ, as so many Christians do today and have down the centuries, seems to be a quaint silliness, perhaps for fanatics but certainly not for them.
As Tom Frame, former Bishop to the Australian Defence Force, wrote-
“the culturally compliant strain of Christianity promoted in Australia does not oblige (people) to embrace lifestyle choices that might involve discomfort.”
The reality is that most get seriously ‘entangled in the civilian affairs’ that the Bible warns against (2 Timothy 2:4). These ‘affairs’ are often the same idols that ensnare twenty-first-century secular Western society, such as consumerism, materialism, children/grandchildren, pleasure, sport, career—’affairs’ that drain away resources from the war effort. Without significant change in the ‘Dead hand of apathy’ (another Elephant) so prevalent among congregational members towards serious and sacrificial involvement in the spiritual battle that is their God-given mission, the war will be lost.
This, there’s a war on ‘Elephant’ that no one wants to talk about is the fact that the Church is at war in Australia (and the West generally). However, to in effect ignore that fact, and to continue to fight the war with only the commitment level required of a peacetime army, without the wholehearted turning over of all resources to the battle (mission), will mean that the war is lost no matter how good our missional strategies might be.
The biblical fact, evidenced by the daily reality we see, is that the Church is at war, and unless and until there is a significant reorganization of the lives of members to maximise resources dedicated to the war effort, the war will be lost. Because there’s virtually no sign of this happening in mainline churches, the need for something completely different (SCD) is so very urgent.
Whatever form the SCD takes, it requires the unbinding of the Church from its paralysed, missionally ineffective, battle-losing apathy to denial a new truly missional wartime army.
Such an army, Church, rather than the comfortable, Sunday-centric peacetime model we see today, will need to look more like the small Christian communities established by the apostles, or the Celts in northern and western Europe, or the missional movements of the nineteenth-century Chinese missionaries. It needs to be a Church in which members are truly willing to turn their resources over to the war effort and be soldiers that actually fight at personal cost for their King and His glory, and for the gospel of Christ Jesus, which is the only weapon that can prevail against the spiritual forces of darkness that are destroying the land.
When a nation is at war, all of life is reorganized and disrupted in order to maximise the war effort. It is not a time for the comfortable life, and there can be no passengers. So must the church become. However, when the prevailing culture is let’s do church but’ Don’t Mention the War’, when church members are ignorant of, or choose to ignore, the war, Satan is happy. That is because he knows there will be no fight, and the army that doesn’t fight loses.
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A discussion of a wide range of ‘Elephants’ can be found in the book Quantum Mission which can be obtained in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats here and at most major online book retailers.
unbounded church 