Has Your Church Lost its Wonder?

Join the book launch for Andrew Fellows' Smuggling Jesus Back Into the Church. Plus, an excerpt.

Greetings 3T readers,

Neither of us remember the first talk we ever heard by Andrew Fellows.

Was it the one that alerted us to the deadly power of introspection?

Maybe it was the old series on narcissism?

It definitely wasn’t Community as a Subversion of Modernity because the title wouldn’t have made sense the first time around.

Perhaps it was the one on our Creator’s gift economy.

But then again, it might have been What Is a Relationship? where Andrew introduced us to Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

Whatever the case may be, our friend Andrew’s Canadian tones have been ringing in our ears for years, guiding us toward transformative ideas. That’s why we are very excited to tell you about his new book, Smuggling Jesus Back Into the Church.

The words of that title were once used to describe the life mission of Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish Lutheran in the 1800s who challenged the worldliness of his mother church.

By worldliness, Kierkegaard and Fellows don’t mean smoking, drinking or going with folks who do. They mean the gradual way in which the world becomes the salt and light of the church, rather than the other way around.

How does this happen? Fellows walks through it in the book, revealing the ways in which egoism, naturalism, hedonism and politicism have found their way into the body of Christ. He also shows the way forward with wisdom, sensitivity, and deep love for the Jesus.

Join the book launch via Zoom this Friday at 8pm GMT/ 3pm EST.

The launch is hosted by English L’Abri and moderated by Phillip, your faithful curator. Until then, enjoy this excerpt from Smuggling Jesus Back Into the Church.

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Photo by David Geib: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-dome-building-2419024/

I wonder if you’ve been to one of those churches that doesn’t feel particularly different from a coffee shop. Neutral décor and mediocre coffee in a hired school hall or a converted warehouse. Mirroring shopping centres and warehouses, it all looks so flattened and horizontal – demonstrating the plane on which we are operating. Even beyond the practical constraints of finding a suitable venue to meet in, there often seems to be no attempt to evoke any sense of transcendence. Living as though planet Earth is the complete package dominates the horizons of our vision.

We’ve forgotten how to live the reality of a faith that practically engages with the supernatural and all that we have in Christ. In a quite literal way, this fits the meaning of being worldly. Although on Sundays we might celebrate Jesus and his amazing miracles, our day-to-day view of reality so easily forgets that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).

The problem of pragmatism

One sign of our disorder is a pragmatic approach to everything in the church. Pragmatism operates with a practical reason that prioritizes what works. We are beguiled by what we can test and measure. We stake our success on measurable outcomes. We have a survey for pretty much everything, which is the epistemic proof of our corporate life and its success. This treats reality as something quantifiable, and our job is to provide this through numbers. Service attendances up 12% and our divorce rate down 3% – so all in all a tremendous year. The numbers we crunch are then used to create our strategic goals for making things better. 

Where numbers might disclose one aspect of reality, they fall short with the fullness of spiritual reality. Try reducing ‘becoming like Christ’ to a measurable outcome! Our obsession with numbers and outcomes shows the loss of a broader horizon. 

If your church escapes this kind of crass pragmatism, you might see it in other ways. A discerning friend told me how most sermons he heard were naturalistic in their application. A Sunday service might begin well enough with the call to worship and a reminder of the supernatural realities of our faith. But come the moment of application for life, it always defaulted to one of what he called the ‘five mores’. Attend more, Evangelize more, Read your Bible more, Pray more and Give more. One could hear such solicitations for months and never be struck by the deeper reality of the supernatural. My wife and I use the acronym ‘E. A.’ to describe this. This stands for ‘evangelical advice’ and ‘easy answers’. 

Losing wonder 

We might also see the symptoms in a rationalistic approach to the faith. Many churches are shackled by a view of the Bible as a mine to be quarried for theological facts. They equate a solid faith with one that has intellectual mastery of all the finer points of theology. A sense of wonder has all but disappeared. Whether someone’s life is filled with the goodness and grace of Jesus is a question that fades into the background. As the scientific outlook removes mystery and has an observable proof for everything, so the church has followed suit by domesticating the faith. We have developed a resistance to the unknown and the inscrutable is taboo. We even apply this to God himself. 

A friend of mine became a Christian because the person who evangelized him professed a God beyond figuring out. When my friend asked why God created the world, the reply was a simple, ‘I don’t know.’ In this answer, he acknowledged that he was dealing with a being greater than his intellect. This led him to bow before a God superior to nature and beyond the reach of science. We have domesticated him today. We shrink him to someone we think we can ‘get’. Our churches seem starved of wonder, and this is symptomatic of a deeper malaise, even among so-called ‘sound’ churches. 

The super-value making sense of all these symptoms is naturalism. And what is this mega ideal? It is a view of reality that sees matter as the source of all things. Everything has an explanation in physics and biology. Julian Huxley was a famous scientist who championed naturalism in the twentieth century. He proclaimed, ‘There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution.’

Such a viewpoint also applies to history, and that means there are no miracles. The incarnation couldn’t have happened, giving a new spin to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. With no miracles, Pentecost didn’t happen, meaning there was no pouring out of the Holy Spirit as the breath of God for creating his church. No miracles also means our future resurrection inaugurated by Christ’s second coming is a futile hope. 

This viewpoint is well expressed in the lyrics of ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon: there is no heaven but only sky above our heads. That’s not so hard to imagine because this is the status quo of how everyone lives today. 

The poet T. S. Eliot thought there was no way of avoiding the dilemma of being either a naturalist or a supernaturalist. A key tenet of Christianity is its affirmation of the supernatural. What we believe depends on the reality of God’s supernatural revelation. Take our starting point – the existence of a Triune God. Week by week, Christians gather to gaze with the eye of faith on the One who transcends nature. He has the kind of being that is awesome and beyond measure. As his worshippers, we know there is more to the world than what our sensory perceptions can access, and that allows us to believe in certainties that have no direct empirical proof to warrant them. As supernaturalists we recognize much that exists beyond the remit of scientific validation. Indeed, all the fundamentals of Chris- tian belief stem from something that is not reducible to nature. God’s creation of the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing), the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, his resurrection from the dead and the Holy Spirit’s miracle of new birth in us: all these and more are rooted in realities nature cannot account for. 

Recovering spiritual reality 

Christians are called to live in two orders of experience. First-order experience relates to what is immediate to our senses. God has designed us for a rich involvement in a world engaging sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. After a long and dreary winter, the sun came out and my wife and I headed for the seaside. Sitting in my deckchair with the rays caressing my face and a cold beer in my hand, I listened to the sea washing up on the shore and embraced first-order experience. As I looked out on the ocean, it filled up my senses. 

Second-order experience is different. Here we perceive and encounter through the eye of faith. Between the realm of the natural and the supernatural is a veil or cloud. To see through to this realm, we require what Paul calls ‘the eyes of your heart’ (Eph. 1:18). He prays for these eyes to be opened so we can perceive what is there. It’s a seeing that goes deeper, reaching to the ‘supernatural’. Without this crucial second sight, Christianity loses its vitality, and we can drift into forgetfulness. 

A vivid example of this is when Elisha and his servant woke up early one morning to discover a hostile mob intent on doing them harm. 2 Kings 6:15–17 records it like this: 

When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. ‘Oh no, my lord! What shall we do?’ the servant asked. 

‘Don’t be afraid,’ the prophet answered. ‘Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.’ 

And Elisha prayed, ‘Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.’ Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. 

As believers, Christ calls us moment by moment to live in the reality of this unseen realm – to see with the eyes of faith. This allows us to probe further into the depths of reality and see more than the physical eye can. 

It is important to clarify that second-order experience should never be a flight from the actual world. The supernatural is part of created reality, a dimension that deepens our appreciation of the natural rather than separating us from it. Seeing with the eyes of the heart is seeing the world as God’s world, created by him full of meaning and purpose, to be received with thanksgiving. 

Christians sometimes get this wrong and think second-order experience is a mystical leap into another universe. In his writing, Francis Schaeffer raised his concern about the new ‘super spirituality’ – a bewildering notion as if we live in two universes. God has designed things so the two orders of experience are integrated. They are not in conflict because they belong to one reality. To live in the supernatural is not to engage something far off. Its reality is always near and at hand. This insight must grip us at all times. To enjoy a moment on the beach is to live in the supernatural. A simple heartfelt thank you to Christ for the sun and cold beer integrated me into both first- and second-order experience. 

I love the way G. K. Chesterton understood the integration of both: 

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front.

As things are at the moment, we can’t get round to the front for a direct look. ‘We live by faith, not by sight’ (2 Cor. 5:7). Faith, however, is still a viewpoint integrating us into the reality of what’s on the other side. 

The Holy Spirit equips all believers for second-order experience. With the eye of faith, we can be certain of what we cannot see. This is not an irrational leap but the quiet confidence of a truth that science cannot validate. Paul uses the language of a heavenly inheritance to describe what we have here. We are blessed right now ‘with every spiritual blessing in Christ’ (Eph. 1:3). We are always in the love of a Father who has set his affection on us.

By faith we have a way of approach that allows us to ‘enter’ these great realities. They may be unseen, but to the eye of faith they are real. Because of this we see further than the physical eye. We have a spiritual vision giving us deep insight into the fullness of reality. And this goes further than the theoretical. And that’s what spiritual wisdom is – insight into the real. 

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Andrew Fellows is director of apologetics at Christian Heritage, Cambridge. Before that he was director of L'Abri Fellowship England. Much of his research and teaching has been devoted to helping Christians make sense of the 'secular age'.

Excerpted with permission from Smuggling Jesus Back into the Church: How the church became worldly and what to do about it by Andrew Fellows. Published by Inter-Varsity Press (IVP)