Mandate and Mission: What Is the Church’s Real Task?

Can the Church ever get too big? Can she spread herself too thin? Can she become more things to more people than her Lord intended? Questions like these need to be asked and they need to be answered. For many churches are drifting into a new definition of themselves, a definition which can involve basic change in their task and structure. Before this has altogether taken place and only rationalization is left, we should ask whether we want it to happen, and if not, what we can do to keep it from happening.

The changing concept of the Church is due in part to a changing concept of the State. The welfare State with its plethora of services to individuals has necessitated wider utilization of private groups. The potential of the State’s bureaucracy is enormous but it is not unlimited. Confronted with a continuing demand for services, the State has hit upon the device of hiring private groups to perform many of these activities. Private groups, including churches, can be engaged to minister to the ill; to care for the aged, orphans, and indigent; to distribute relief; to do research; to educate, to administer foreign aid, and so on. The government pays these groups out of taxes for the social services they perform. It is sometimes argued that the more of these services that can be assigned to churches the better.

Big Government and Big Church

This development in government has been paralleled by a like development in the churches. We may call this the concept of the “Big Church.” Recently an official of a denominational board of hospitals was boasting of the empire he ruled. He martialed statistics of beds, patients, nurses, doctors, technicians with obvious relish. All he needed was a few more of this and a few more of that to round out his domain. Here, I thought, is the unthinking exponent of clericalism. Here is the advocate of the Big Church. Society would be better off—it could even be saved—if only church institutions could be bigger and more numerous. The concept of the Big Church would of course get an enormous boost if tax funds were available. Indeed, what could God not do if he had the money!

A Methodist bishop writes an article pleading with his church to take more tax money for the performance of spiritual tasks. His thesis is simple: the Lord has set the Church here to do good works. The Church is doing them, but her endeavors are limited by lack of funds. Where is the greatest source of funds available for spiritual and humanitarian endeavors? The State! Therefore it is the State’s duty to provide and the Church’s duty to accept all the funds that can be made available through this channel.

Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen went before a Congressional committee studying foreign aid to urge that all aid programs in the categories of relief and welfare should be assigned to the church. The church, he felt, would do a more “spiritual” job. A number of church officials recently appeared before another Congressional committee asking that all military surplus abroad be turned over to the missionaries for use in their programs. They argued that this was the best possible use that could be made of these enormous stocks of goods and equipment.

Some leaders of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States are vigorously advocating a new plan for education of the young. They urge that we forego our traditional program of public education controlled and administered by the people acting through their duly chosen officials. They urge that we substitute instead a plan by which education would be turned over to clerics and other private groups who would be subsidized by the government to do the job.

Roman Catholic Bishop Lawrence J. Shehan of Bridgeport, Connecticut, preaching at a Red Mass in connection with the American Bar Association, lectured Chief Justice Earl Warren and two associate justices of the United States Supreme Court who were present on how wrong they had been in their interpretation of the First Amendment. He accused the United States government of being unfair to Catholics by levying such high taxes that they could not pay for their denominational schools. He called for a new interpretation of the First Amendment in which government would cooperate with the church by extending subsidies for the work the church was doing in educating the young. Cardinal McIntyre charged that school aid programs which did not include Catholic schools are “discriminatory.”

The Task of Christ’s Followers

What is a Church? This is a highly pertinent question. It is our contention that the Church is a unique society and, because unique, limited. She has a mandate from her Lord to proclaim the Gospel. She is charged to bear witness to what God has done in Jesus Christ. The Church is the only group on earth which has this mandate and this is the only mandate she has. As she is true to her founder and herself, she is to do this one thing.

The Church is not primarily an educational institution. She is not a healing agency. She does not consist of homes, orphanages, relief headquarters, or social agencies. She may be all these things incidentally, but she is not any or all of them basically. The foundational function of the Church is worship and her basic task is evangelism, including missions. In the practical conduct of this enterprise, education certainly is necessary; healing, relief, care of the unfortunate are necessary as well. But these services are means to the end of the authentic Christian enterprise. They are never ends in themselves so far as Christians are concerned.

The Church is caught in this dilemma between the “small” and the “big.” Is the Church a colony of heaven, a unique society founded by Jesus Christ with but tenuous roots in the passing cultural scene? Or, is she primarily a social institution, a convenient form of organization for the performance of social servises? If she is the latter, the Church should seek all the aid from tax funds that she can obtain. She should become frankly competitive with other non-profit groups and openly strive for the lion’s share of the State’s welfare dollar. If the Church is a welfare agency existing for the purpose of performing social services, then she should be this to the hilt.

A Note of Warning

It is only fair to sound a note of warning as the Church seems to move in that direction. If the Church succumbs to the lure of the State’s gold and becomes merely one of many social functionaries, her loss will be irreparable. Certainly she will forfeit whatever claim she may exert as a unique society. Under such circumstances the Church becomes, in effect, another secular institution. That is to say, she ceases to be the Church and becomes something else. She has no reason for survival beyond the performance of immediate temporary tasks.

A Guide for Action

The Church would be well advised to hold fast to her heritage as Christ’s own society with her sole mandate for Him. As such, we would recommend that the Church avoid involvement with the State and refuse the support of all funds collected by taxation. If the Church should follow such a course, we offer the following guide for her educational, social, and welfare programs:

1. Such programs should avoid interlocking with the State.

2. Financial grants from the State should be rejected.

3. Participation in such programs should be limited to pioneer projects in which the Church could blaze a trail or open a new vista—the kind of enterprise that conventional groups might hesitate to sponsor. The Church should avoid routine forms of welfare activity.

4. The Church’s social and welfare programs should be geared to worship and evangelism.

5. They should be limited to those enterprises which the Church can herself support through voluntary gifts of adherents.

Associate Director

Protestants and Other Americans United

Washington, D. C.

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