A Vision For the 21st Century Church (1989)

I want to go back to what happened to the Roman Catholic Church.  The problem in Europe was that she never saw what was happening because it took place so gradually. And the priest, the cardinals, and the pope have blamed the people.  But the truth of the matter is, Roman Catholic practices simply became outdated to its people. I don’t know if you know this, but the Sunday morning Mass that the Catholic people are subjected to every Sunday was actually created virtually the way it is done today, around the year 560, by a gentleman who is referred to in church history as Gregory the Great. Now, to go 1,500 years without changing your order of service is a study in suicide.

Now, what is it that is truly withering away our foundations so imperceptibly that we cannot see them?  This imperception is our greatest enemy. Now, to tell you what it is, I’m going to have to make a major change here in this message, and I want you to follow me.  First, I need to explain to you that though my ministry is on the deeper Christian life, I write books on the history of the church. In fact, I believe that the book entitled “The Revolution: The Story of the First-Century Church” is the largest-selling church history book in the English language.

Now, I made a mistake that I may live to regret today. Some years ago, a long time ago in fact, I began to, as a hobby, study where we Protestants got our traditions, where we got our practices. I’m going to once more draw the line. I have nothing to say about our theology, but gentlemen, I will tell you that most of our practices today did not come from the New Testament. They came from traditions, most of them right around the Reformation.  And let me hasten to say to all of you that those traditions are by the day becoming more and more outdated and irrelevant to the changing matrix of North America.  And we will change with it. Not our message, not our convictions, but our practice, or we will suffer in the 21st century the same fate the Roman Catholics suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Now, I suppose right now at this moment, I’m glad I’m in New England and you’re in Texas. By the way, Texas is my home state. I come from Tyler. I was really looking forward to being back where people don’t have an accent at all.  I didn’t expect to not be with you, but right now I’m glad I’m not. I don’t know if you can take the next few minutes.  By the way, someday I hope this will be in a book, and it will all be textually documented.

You’re going to have to believe that what you’re about to hear is true.  Where did we get our practices? If I had a verse of Scripture to read to you, it would be Philippians 3.13, where Paul says, Forgetting those things which are behind, I press on.  Gentlemen, one of the most difficult things we as ministers do, and especially those of us who are Baptists, is to forget that which we have latched on to in the way of practices. You know the old story. Anytime a Baptist does anything two times in a row, after that, it becomes a New Testament doctrine.  There are practices that will have to be dropped.

Let’s just begin with some of them, and I hope you’ll listen very carefully. I think you all know that the church building did not exist as a Christian concept until the days of Constantine.  He literally emptied the coffers of the pagan temples and built buildings commemorating saints all over Italy, all over the Holy Lands, and then, during the reign of his sons, this spread all over Europe,  buildings that Christians had never even conceived of. In Constantinople, they walked into these buildings, just stunned at what they were, couldn’t conceive of them, but they had been given as gifts to the churches. The Constantinople Christians walked into them; they had forgotten to put in pews, and the people sat down on the floor. And then they were told they couldn’t do that, so they stood up.  And today the Eastern Orthodox Church stands through its entire two-hour service because of what happened that day.

The Italians, being a little bit less tight about this, brought in benches.  And believe it or not, the chair was invented just about the time of Martin Luther, and with it, the back of a pew was invented. And so the Eastern Orthodox stand, the Roman Catholics sit on benches, and we Protestants get to lean back and relax a bit.  That’s the pew. That’s the church building.

The church building came to us through the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church.  It is not New Testament. It is not scriptural. It is a tradition. And I would like to repeat what I said. And you may quote me on this.  In the year 2089, whatever is going on in the Christian faith, I predict, gentlemen, that those who are still tied to the church building will be irrelevant to the Christian faith.  The Christian faith will find its expression somewhere outside the church building. This concept of the church being a building will one day be passé.

My wife and I were married on television in New York City, in Rockefeller Plaza, Studio B, National Broadcasting Company, on an old program you never heard of called Bride and Groom.  And we were put up free of charge in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Last year, celebrating our 35th anniversary, we decided to go back there and found out that the Barbizon Plaza Hotel has been converted into condominiums.  And those things are selling. Little one, two-room apartments are selling at $400,000, half a million dollars. Now, how could Christians go in there today and build a church building around Fifth Avenue to minister to the hundreds of thousands of people who are moving back to downtown as hotels are being converted into condominiums and apartments.  There’s no way. It would take five to ten million dollars at this moment to build a church building in downtown New York, and then, gentlemen, no one in those buildings would come.

In the next 40 or 50 years, we’re going to see real estate become so precious that it will be impossible to be tied to the concept of a church building.  When I was born, 10-15% of a man’s income went to his home. It grew to 30%, 40%. On the West Coast today, it’s pushing 50% and 60%.  This trend will continue, and property will be beyond our ability to work with.

That’s not all.  The social matrix is changing. People will, for reasons I nor you can comprehend, simply lose interest in sitting down in a pew and hearing a message and going home.  There is a loneliness that has come with our present-day society, with its abstractions and its computers and its isolation, in which men and women are innately, instinctively crying out within themselves for something we don’t have a word for.  So let me use a word: the word community, the word of people caring for one another, living close to one another, having a relationship that is not provided by a building that we report into two, three, or four hours a week.  We will move out of the church buildings in the 21st century into homes, coming back to the primitive origins of the Christian faith, where we began for the first 313 years of our history.  We will do that.

Now, we will suffer incalculable losses. Well, I can go on through lots of other things here, and let me do so. Have you ever wondered why we meet, all of us Protestants meet, at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning?  Everywhere in the world, Protestants gather at 11 a.m. It’s sacrosanct, and no one seems to ever question why, in fact, we don’t ever seem to question most of our traditional practices. It’s like this tie, I don’t know where it came from or why I wear it, it’s of no utilitarian value. I cannot conceive of what this lapel is doing here. This collar serves no purpose. I have a heel on my shoe that causes a backache, but because it’s there, I wear it, and we do not often ask where we got things that seem to be New Testament in their concept.