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Chan says we must first "probe the ontology of the church"—that is, what the church is in its essence. Chan believes most evangelicals have an "instrumentalist view of the church," in which the church's basic identity "can be expressed in terms of its functions: what it must do to fulfill God's larger purpose." In this view, "the church is only a subspecies of creation and must discover the clue to its identity within the created order."

The supreme example, Chan notes, is Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture, where culture—not the church—is the all-embracing reality. The church's role is to figure out how it fits into that larger reality: Christ against culture, Christ transforming culture, and so forth. "This implies," says Chan, "that the church derives its basic identity from the larger world."

A better way to view the Bible's narrative is "to see creation as forming the backdrop for God's elective grace and covenant relationship." That is, Chan says, God created the world in order to enter into a covenanted relationship with his people, beginning with Abraham and culminating in Jesus Christ and the church.

Chan continues: "The church does not exist in order to fix a broken creation; rather, creation exists to realize the church. To be sure, the church's coming into being does require the overcoming of sin, but that is quite different from saying that the problem of sin is the reason for the church's being. God made the world in order to make the church, not vice versa."

This idea is not a figment of Chan's theological imagination, but, as he points out, is grounded in revelation: "[God] chose us in him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in his sight (Eph. 1:4)." We must always remember that the church as the people of God is not an afterthought or a means to an end, but the end itself.

Chan outlines a number of implications from this line of theology. First, the church cannot be understood as the creation of the devout, something that is merely the most efficient and effective way to organize ourselves to do mission. With this insight, Chan challenges a widely held evangelical presupposition. As the late Stanley Grenz has noted, the evangelical movement is largely parachurch-oriented in its self-conception. Its "non-ecclesiology" is the "voluntary society," formed by the creative will of the members to accomplish some greater purpose.

Recent examples of such thinking abound. George Barna in Revolution (Tyndale, 2005) proclaims, "We should keep in mind that what we call 'church' is just one interpretation of how to develop and live a faith-centered life. We made it up." And later, "Growing numbers of young adults, teenagers, and even adolescents are piecing together spiritual elements they deem worthwhile, constituting millions of personalized 'church' models."

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch are two Australian thinkers who are gaining an increasing following among pastors and other church leaders intrigued with "the missional church." In The Shaping of Things to Come (Hendrickson, 2003), they argue that we need to "reinvent the church" in "revolutionary" ways so that we can "incarnate the gospel within a specific cultural context."

Ironically, while Barna, Frost, Hirsch, and others believe they are doing something revolutionary, they are conceiving the church largely in a traditional evangelical way, a way that unfortunately permits the church to uncritically repeat a pattern of cultural engagement that has historically compromised its integrity. They assume the church is first and foremost a human creation that must be adapted to culture to continue to be relevant. Their passion for the church and its mission, and many of their creative ministry suggestions, are bringing new enthusiasm for the church's mission. But it is difficult to conceive a "revolution" founded on such a mission-driven ecclesiology that won't succumb to cultural accommodation, as has every similar evangelical revolution.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11