Mr. Churchill’s ideas, on the other hand, represented a different concept, one which may be called churchism, or pietistic otherworldliness, a concept which encourages the church’s retreat from the world. It creates an artificial distinction between the religious and the secular, the religious being thought of as worship and all the other activities that go on in the church building, and the secular considered to be everything that goes on outside the building. In its local version churchism is parochialism, or total preoccupation with the church as an institution at the level of the local community.
The tragedy of such parochialism is that the creative thought and energies of people are consumed in the mere maintenance of the church as an institution, and in dead-end religious activity and worship. Mr. Churchill, and thousands of others who are like him, think of the church only as “gathered,” as a congregation. They think that the church is most truly the church when its members are assembled in the church building and engaged in church work. They think of the church in terms of “going to church,” of working for its organizations, of planning for its promotion, and of meeting the needs of the church as an entity separate from the rest of life. What is even worse, these people think that only when they are doing this church work are they serving God. Theologically, their concept means that Christ died for the church.
Instead, Christ died for the world! The purpose, then, of the church is not to meet its own needs but to serve God’s purposes in the world. This forces upon us the position that not only should we think of the church in its gathered sense, but also in its dispersed sense. This means that church people should think18 of themselves as members of the church when they are out in the world, and that their work in the world is the means through which God may act through them in the accomplishment of His purposes. Therefore, in terms of the gathered church we can speak of “church work,” but in terms of the dispersed church we must think of the “work of the church in the world,” the work of the instrument of God’s purposes there.
The relation between the gathered church and the dispersed church should be complementary. The church, as the people of God, comes together in a conscious way from out of the world to be renewed, instructed, and equipped for the purpose of returning, as the body of Christ, to its task in the world. Then, out of its work in the world, the church gathers again to worship, to make its offerings, and to be strengthened anew for its work in the world. Elsewhere I have likened the church to an army that has been sent on a mission. In order to accomplish its purpose, it must have a base. In order to have a base, it must assign certain troops to the task of building and maintaining that base, so that the rest of the army may be free to accomplish its mission. We tend, however, to forget the “mission” and wastefully assign most of our people to building and maintaining bases, with the result that we do not accomplish our true purpose. More members need to be assigned to and trained for the mission, where the conflict between life and death goes on unceasingly.
Contrary to the opinion of Mr. Churchill, therefore, a complementary relation exists between the church and the world. The world is the sphere of God’s action, and the church is the means of His action. The church must be found at work in the world, where it will encounter the tension between the saving purposes of God and the self-centered purposes of man.
As in the case of clericalism, so it is in the case of churchism. There is a human reason for the existence of the concept and for its prevalence in the church. The reason, in Mr. Churchill’s case, was to be found in the conflict that he felt between his human interests and his church membership. He had certain real estate19 holdings and other investments from which he was making an excellent profit. Some of these, however, were exploitive and in contradiction to the faith which he professed. It was necessary, therefore, for him to keep the church and the world separate; and his doctrine of the church made it possible for him to rationalize the split between his faith and his life. We must not think that Mr. Churchill engaged in this contradiction deliberately. In part, his action was the unconscious means by which he held on to two conflicting values without suffering from the conflict between them. We must not think that Mr. Churchill is alone in this kind of separation of belief and practice, of splitting the church from the world. We all have our own individual forms of it.
It is because of our insecurity and fear that we develop these defensive attitudes of parochialism and churchism. We huddle like frightened children behind the doors of the church, whereas, as soldiers of Christ, we should be struggling courageously on the frontiers of life where the conflicts between love and hate, truth and prejudice, are being waged.
Moralism
The next member of the group who spoke up was Mrs. Strait, and she voiced for herself and for millions of other church people the moralistic understanding of the faith. Moralism is perhaps the most widespread of all the concepts that we are now discussing.
Moralism is usually identified as belief in good behavior as a source of life. A group of church people, many of them leaders of their respective parishes, were asked to describe the Christian. It would be no exaggeration to say that their descriptions of a Christian made it difficult to distinguish him from a Jew, because, according to their statements, a Christian is one who achieves his status as such by obeying the commandments of God. He must live a good life by keeping the law. The imitation of Jesus is the method, illuminated by a study of His teachings, especially the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. And, as Mrs. Strait20 indicated, they agreed that a Christian should set a good example for other people.