What some groups call renewal is really mutiny.
The ship is a classic symbol of the church. From ancient etchings, to Rembrandt canvases, to the letterhead of First Presbyterian, the people of God have often been pictured as a vessel cutting through storm-tossed waves, kept on course by the Captain at the helm. It is a venerable image, and a helpful one—provided the proper craft is pictured. You do not have to live in Seattle or Boston to know there is a variety of ways to get across the water: rafts and canoes, sloops and yawls, tugs and barges, cruisers and liners. What sort of ship is the church?
It can only be a schooner. I say this not out of aesthetic preference, though I don’t deny considerable affection for this great and graceful craft, but because it most accurately depicts the communal life of Christians. The church must be a sailing vessel, for it moves only by the power of wind, the ruach of God. And it must be large enough to carry the whole covenant family through the roughest seas; only a two-masted schooner has the spaciousness and the steadiness necessary.
Now, some may counter: Isn’t the church more like an armada of different vessels? So it seems, certainly, if we absolutize the differences between Saint Peter Catholic and Wesley Methodist and Calvary Chapel. But the church has always confessed its essential unity: “we believe,” in the words of the Nicene Creed, “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” It is more accurate, therefore, to view the divisions as inevitable arguments of sinful sailors on board a single ship.
Slow sailing
For the schooner to get out of the harbor demands a division of labor. The officers, serving under the Captain, provide leadership for many tasks. Gazing dreamily upon the horizon might be nice, but there is precious little time for it. Sails must be tended and lines spliced, brass polished, decks swabbed, compasses read, and logs kept. A working schooner, in other words, is no Love Boat. There is plenty to do, and the doing of it requires organization and attention to details—which is to say, the schooner is an institution.
It is a slow-moving institution, to be precise. A schooner moves through the water surely and steadily, but not speedily. It has too much bulk, too heavy a keel keeping the ship balanced. Some sailors, it seems, find this difficult to endure.
There have always been those who think the church does not move quickly enough, who despair of its institutional sluggishness, who wonder what spreading tar and sewing canvas have to do with the love of sailing that got them on the ship in the first place. They forsake hope of reforming the routines of the schooner, and they doubt whether it will ever make it to the harbor.
So with other like-minded souls they determine to set off by themselves. They find smaller boats on deck, more maneuverable and less cumbersome—the property of the schooner, really—and in the name of “renewal” they commandeer them. They want the thrill of skimming across water; they feel a need to separate themselves from other sailors who have, in their view, made too many compromises and become too comfortable with routines.
They leave the ship partly for good motives. They long for a community nearer the ideal of the kingdom, as if the Lord himself had not described the kingdom in this age as a field with wheat and weeds growing side by side. Life aboard a schooner can be difficult; a large crew means a variety of people, which means contending ideas and conflicting personalities. Like Noah’s ark, if it weren’t for the storm outside you could not stand the smell inside. Ah, to be with real sailors, to be set free from the floating mess they call the institutional church!
Other motives are not so good. There is boredom, for example. Life on board ship can get dull; the same chores need doing day after day. And months go by with barely a whisper of wind, when everything slows intolerably.
Anyone who has been on board the schooner for any time knows what happens next. An enthusiasm, often a neglected truth that needs fresh emphasis, sweeps through the ship with the help of best-selling books and newly crowned stars (making reform, not incidentally, a profitable enterprise). The result is distortion; passion for one truth can drown others in its wake. Eventually some zealots grow impatient with the rest of the crew, who seem too content to sail in the wrong direction. So they leave the ship.
What happens to them? It is no doubt pretty exciting at first. Little boats, closer to the elements, are more easily lifted by the wind. Everything feels so much more authentic, and the adventurers want everyone else to have the same experience.
But it is a big sea. Storms can be rough—especially on small craft. The enthusiasts soon discover that having fewer people on board does not necessarily guarantee harmony. Disagreements arise. New ways of doing things must be discovered through trial and error. The errors, unfortunately, wash a few sailors overboard.
Admittedly, a schooner needs continual revitalization, but authentic reformers have always remained committed to the ship. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, for instance, never intended to divide the crew; their work, as they saw it, was the renewal of the “one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Following the captain’s word
To grow spiritually, we must stay with the ship. The Captain has provided three things to keep us on course.
First, the Word. We need the navigational direction of the Captain, and so we must stay connected to the Word of God. This Word is sufficient for all our needs, for by it creation came into being (“And God said, let there be light”), and through the Word-made-flesh, the recreation of all things has begun. We call the Bible the Word of God, because from its pages God continues to speak to nothing, and it sits up and becomes something; and from those same pages God continues the work of grace manifest through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Heresy does not ignore Scripture, but it sees only a part of it. From Arianism in the fourth century to the “health and wealth” gospel of the twentieth, the pattern is the same: a bit of truth is emphasized in isolation from the broad sweep of Scripture, and the consequent distortion and imbalance leads away from the schooner.
The proper use of Scripture, therefore, demands that every part be understood in relation to the whole, and the whole of Scripture leads to Christ. It is not enough for a would-be reformer to quote this verse or that; authentic renewal only happens through encounter with “the whole counsel of God.”
Shifting attention from Scripture to other “revelations,” no matter how spiritual they seem, always results in trivialization. Not long ago this journal reported on the “Kansas City prophets,” who reportedly give “words of knowledge.” In a service, for example, it is announced that someone in the audience has a father named Howard who needs prayer, or that someone has a backache in need of healing.
Well, so what? (I’m not being flip but asking a serious theological question.) These tidbits of information, though perhaps a manifestation of the Spirit, cannot compare with the wonder of God’s Word revealed in Jesus Christ and made known to us through Scripture. The Enemy must be pleased when the people of God divert their attention to something that, while appearing “spiritual,” is really relatively unimportant. All the “oohs” and “ahs” of impressed audiences at such times cannot hide the trivialization of God that takes place. Scripture alone has the authority to convey an adequate understanding of God; Scripture alone is the infallible guide for faith and practice.
Searching for signs
Second, the sacraments. We must be satisfied with the concrete signs we have been given. Life on the schooner, as I said, can get dull. The promise of more obvious proofs of God’s presence, more dazzling signs and wonders, may tempt us to follow others and jump ship.
But the Lord himself promised only two signs as the physical indication of his presence—baptism and the Supper. The God-given act of initiation into Christian discipleship is not going forward at an altar call, or becoming an official member of a church; the sign of becoming one with Christ and his people is baptism. And the God-given act of spiritual nourishment is not a miraculous answer to prayer, or an ecstatic experience, or having a vision of shining angels; the sign that thus sustains and strengthens faith is a simple meal of bread and wine.
Just as inattention to Scripture leads to trivialization, so also does neglect of the sacraments, for our seeking after more dramatic signs and wonders will inevitably be shaped by our own narrow desires. As a result, God gets reduced to being the slave of our shortsighted longings. The holy God of the patriarchs and prophets, the Father who raised Jesus from the dead and opened the gates of eternal life, becomes a genie whose specialty is to lengthen legs and find parking places for impatient drivers. Though we might prefer something more dramatic, these acts of washing and eating have power enough to keep us sailing until we arrive safely at the harbor.
Staying with the crew
Finally, the community. We must stay with the rest of the crew. No matter how resigned others seem to the institutional structure of the ship, and no matter how inadequate their understanding of proper seamanship, we may not separate ourselves from them. There is one body of Christ, only one. Those who launch out in little boats of imagined doctrinal purity not only sin against the body—and in so doing sin against the Captain, who prays for the unity of the crew—they also find themselves in waters too treacherous to navigate on their own.
If ever a person might have felt justified in having an independent ministry, Paul was the man. The resurrected Christ had dramatically seized him and commissioned him for special tasks. He had great success establishing churches all over the Mediterranean world. But even though he did not always agree with other leaders, he felt compelled to have his ministry approved by the presbytery of Jerusalem; he willingly submitted to the council of elders. Why? Because he knew they were all part of one body—disagreements or not—and they really had no choice but to labor together on behalf of the kingdom.
Staying with the crew also entails staying with those who have gone before us, those sisters and brothers who have braved rough seas and endured the drudgery of seamanship, who have completed their voyage and are now safe in the harbor. They have much to teach us, if we let them.
Would-be reformers generally view tradition as a problem rather than a solution. They think the ship moves too slowly because the barnacles of tradition have encrusted the hull. The chisel of renewal doesn’t seem sharp enough to chip them off, so it seems best to launch a new, smooth-bottomed boat.
It behooves sailors to show a little humility. Why waste time devising new knots, some of which won’t hold, if old salts have already discovered ones that serve well? More efficient ways of doing things may be found, certainly, but only on board the ship, only within the community. The traditional patterns developed for a reason; they must be understood and mastered before they can be fine-tuned.
Respect for tradition is not simply efficient; it is trusting a promise of our Lord. On the night of his arrest, Jesus assured his disciples, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Everyone tempted to leave the ship had better ponder these questions: Has the Holy Spirit been inactive for the last two millennia? Is it probable the Holy Spirit has waited until this exact moment in history to reveal the truth that warrants separation from other sailors? Does not the Holy Spirit always work toward unity and not division?
The Holy Spirit who fills the sails of the schooner and moves it through the centuries is the same Spirit who speaks in the Word, who seals our faith through the sacraments, and who creates community among believers. To leave the ship, in other words, is to leave the sphere of the Spirit. Life on board the ship may not be all we would like, but it is the life the Spirit has given us. It should therefore be received with thanksgiving. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at a time of great compromise and cowardice in the German church, wrote, “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.” In other words, “Happy sailing.”
Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
