ekklesia: why exist?

Imagine for a second that the CEO of a business decides to expand the company.

He takes a group of fairly plain workers and trains them for the purpose of eventually leading this planned expansion. He spends a number of years teaching them to do what he does, and to emulate it in the context of a new expression of the business. The point of this chosen group is that they would embody the vision of the company, and that they would enact the implications of this vision in terms of their daily business.

The CEO then sets them off on their own as the expansion occurs.

Not many years down the track things begin to degenerate. This chosen group begins to forget why exactly they were chosen. Rather than existing as a group for the sake of the vision of the business they begin to exist solely for their own benefit. They still do some of the things they were entrusted to do in the expansion, but as a whole this group is not fulfilling the full vision of the CEO.

Rather than existing for the purpose for which the CEO created them, this group now exists largely for its own welfare, and for its own survival as a unit.

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It is probably fairly obvious by now that this illustration is intended as an analogy for many churches. Not all churches, but certainly many of them. Let me explain why I say this.

jesus’ apocalypse

Warning: Bible nerd alert.

Well it has been a while since I blogged. Good to get some thoughts down again.

This will also be my first time in a while writing on biblical studies, and it feels good to be back talking about a discipline I feel at home in…

So I have been writing a series of lectures on the Gospel of Matthew, and over the last two weeks have written on the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24-25, a section I have broadly referred to as Jesus’ Apocalypse. This section of Jesus’ teaching is thought by most people to be about the so-called ‘End Times’, with the vast majority of biblical commentators claiming at least most of the discourse is related to that event.

More specifically, Matthew 24:30 has been taken by most as referring to the Second Coming:

Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

However I have taken a different view.