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A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society, by Rodney Clapp (InterVarsity, 25 pp.; $14.99, paper);

Death of the Church: The Church at the End of the 21st Century, by Mike Regele (Zondervan, 352 pp.; $22.99, hardcover). Reviewed by John Ortberg, teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois, and author of The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Transformation for Ordinary People (forthcoming from Zondervan).

At a conference for United Methodist clergy, Bishop William Grove told of a recent visit to a church in Germany. The pastor was talking to a group of 20-or-so year-olds and took longer to get to Grove than is customary when greeting a bishop. By way of apologizing, he explained that he had just met these young people earlier in the week: they were gathered outside on the steps of the church one day when he arrived, and they asked him: "What is this place?" "It's a church," he told them. "What's a church?" they asked. He fumbled for words: "It's a place where we meet; more than that it's the group of all of us who have devoted ourselves to following Jesus." "Who is Jesus?" More fumbling: "He was a person we believe was sent from God—was God Himself—whom God raised from the dead."

The primary moral Grove drew is that we have experienced the passing of Christendom. For better or for worse, the notion of Western religious consensus and the concepts of parish and clerical roles that went with it are gone and are not likely to return.

This is precisely the situation that has occasioned both A Peculiar People, by Rodney Clapp, and Death of the Church, by Mike Regele. While they are very different kinds of books, and lead to different implications, they are both avowedly postmodernist calls to acknowledge, respond to, and (to some extent at least) celebrate the end of an era inaugurated by Constantine.

A Peculiar People is the more theologically reflective and academically informed of the two books. Clapp writes as "a plebian, post-modern Christian"—he is not formally an academician, but is widely read in theology and political science as well as his own field of journalism. He has written a book rich with insight on how the church might become in our day an alternative way of life in a world of crushing secularism.

For Clapp, the Constantinian near-identification of church and state that looked like the salvation of the church from persecution has instead very nearly been its destruction. It has led the Western church to so identify with the existing power structures that it has often offered little more than "the religious sponsorship of the status quo" (what C. S. Lewis called "Christianity and … "). If anything, the Reformers worsened this tendency, for their dependence on the state to sustain them in the battle against Rome wed them to worldly power much more tightly (the notable exception for Clapp being the Anabaptist movements).

So the current crisis—the church often feeling irrelevant or useless—is actually a wake-up call. It is a severe mercy to feel useless when you are doing the wrong things. Clapp hopes that we might recover from this paralysis by gaining a sense of ourselves as "a peculiar people"—that is, that the church might rediscover its calling to be a culture, its own way of life. This will require a number of corrections:

—We must learn to stop thinking of the "true" church as some invisible, ahistorical, acultural reality. The church can be experienced only in and through (and as) culture.

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June 16 1997, Vol. 41, No. 7