It was refreshing to read your article again almost a year later. Your warnings and questions are vital to consider:

“Who do you know and love that is really very different from you? Who do you associate with who stretches you beyond your comfort zone? Who do you share the vision of Christ’s kingdom with that is not exactly like you in the small things that we are all prone to turn into the big things because they are “our” unique contributions?”

Ecclesiology comes from the Greek work “ecclesia,” (or ekklesia) which means “assembly,” and it refers to the Christian church. So if our ecclesiology is stronger than our Christology, it means that we emphasize what we do in church more than what Christ has done for us. Thus, what people are moved by or remember in church is what the church and people in church do, or has done, or will do, rather than by what Christ has done for us, and continues to do for us.

Because we Christians are all still quite sinful after becoming Christians, we default horizontally (to the church) rather than vertically (to Christ). All of Paul’s 13 epistles are dealing with “sinful” Christians, which includes us. As John Calvin said or implied (I’m paraphrasing), “We Christians are all partial non-believers until Christ comes again.” So, unless we make a conscious concerted effort we will inadvertently exalt the church and assume Christ, or at the expense of Christ. I think all churches, to whatever degree, does this. I don’t know if we in UBF do this any more than other churches.

I hope this makes sense.

I am not big on big words. In order to understand your writing, I need to understand your sentence about ecclesiology. Could you explain ecclesiology (I am not sure even spelling is right) in a simple term so that ordianary people can understand?

Augustine

Could it be that perhaps our ubf ecclesiology has become more dominant than our Christology? Doesn’t every great church and Christian movement incline toward exalting her own ecclesiology, thus assuming the gospel? So, we perhpas inadvertently celebrate what God has done in our church, more than celebrating God Himself, through Christ and through the Holy Spirit. This, as you alluded to, could lead to us to “turn inward and promote its own insights,” thus becoming sectarian and “tribalized.” Sometimes, it seems like even a global church movement like ours could behave like a fish in a fishbowl that is unaware that there is a vast ocean out there.

It seems that every church that God has used mightily through out history has to prayerfully guard against this seemingly inevitable sequence of events: It starts out as a (1) Movement, which then becomes a (2) Method, then a (3) Monument, then a (4) Museum. This surely happened even with the “ideal” church in Acts.

As Joe mentioned, we tend to be “triumphalistic” in our reports, newsletter and blogs, which then tends to ignor or avoid discussing real problems and issues, especially the painful, tragic and embarassing ones. Surely, we need to get out of our “comfort zone,” so that we can newly experience a “death and resurrection.”

It’s surely also so easy to desire and default to feel security, stability and strength by assuming our own “rightness” in serving Christ. But Richard Lovelace wrote: “The culture is put on as though it were armor against self-doubt, but it becomes a mental strait-jacket.”

Thanks again, John, for our 1st official and very appropriate essay on UBFriends.org. Thanks Joe, Brian, Mary and others who have provided this platform for us to be friends with “warts and all.”

I think your observations about UBF are spot-on. We have a distinctive history, culture and mission which makes us different from North American churches. We feel those differences at a very deep level; they have become part of our collective psyche, and without realizing it we emphasize those differences every time we meet together. (One example of this: the prayers we offer at our meetings and worship services focus very heavily on what God is doing in UBF.) But in the bigger picture, we are not so different. Every church and ministry has a unique story to tell. We need to tell our story to other parts of the Body of Christ, and we need to listen to their stories in return.

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of UBF. God has done great things among us. We have enormous potential as reflected in the lives of members who display a very high level of personal dedication to the ministry and to the cause of Christ. God is still working among us and we are thankful for it.

But we also need a reality check, because in many respects our ministry is not doing as well as we should. The reports that we post about our own activities are overwhelmingly positive, because we have trained ourselves to speak about ourselves in very positive, glowing (almost triumphalistic) terms. We ought to consider the very real possibility that our ministry could fail. The landscape of Christian history is littered with the remains of churches and communities that have fallen apart or made themselves irrelevant for the very reasons that you mentioned. If we fail to catch the fresh winds of the Spirit in this new generation, and if we fail to connect ourselves to the larger Body of Christ in meaningful ways, then the prognosis is not good. But if we humble ourselves to be obedient to the Spirit, to both serve and learn from other parts of the Body, then I have no doubt that God will bless and use UBF in exciting ways for many years to come.