We have been preaching through the book of Nehemiah recently, and I've been really struck by how directly relevant it is for us. Nehemiah is engaged in rebuilding Jerusalem after a devastating fall. The city wall lies in ruins, and consequently the remnant living in the city "are in great trouble and disgrace." (1:3) To rebuild the wall is more than an infrastructure project; it is in a sense to rebuild the people, to restore a sense of identity and security.
To me this resonates with the situation of the church in the West in the twenty-first century. Those who are engaged in building the church - the people, of course, not the physical buildings - are not building on clear ground. In the apostle's image of the building site in 1 Corinthians 3, we are not starting with a nice clean, level site. Rather, in the post-Christian West, we are building amidst the rubble of the past. Our ancestors built much - some of it was good, some of it was less good, and now it is mostly in ruins. Not just the church, but the civilisation that sprang largely from the church's influence, is everywhere reduced to little more than rubble.
I frequently recall T.S. Eliot's words:
Thus your fathers were made
Fellow citizens of the saints, of the household of GOD, being built upon the foundation
Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.
But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?
I think we have to admit we have not built well. But there is no point bemoaning that fact. We have not built well, but Christ will build his church. If we want to join in, if we want to participate in his great work, that will mean a certain amount of sifting through the rubble to work out what from the past is still usable. (There is no point, by the way, in complaining that the rubble gets in the way. If the Lord had wanted to start again, to just condemn the teetering walls that are left and move to a new site, he could have done that. But he is faithful, and more patient with us than we are with ourselves, and calls us sometimes to strengthen the things that remain rather than dash on into new and more immediately profitable endeavours). It will also mean, no doubt, some new building that recognises the new circumstances in which we build.
Many things will fall under that heading of building the church - evangelism, of course, and the numerical rebuilding of the church. But also renewal - of liturgy, of church discipline, of church government, of preaching and catechesis. And aesthetic renewal, cultural renewal - seeing the church develop into something which might again be a cornerstone of a wider culture that is blessed by the gospel. Not all this renewal will be retrieval. Some of the rubble deserves to be left on the heap, either because it was never great or because it will no longer serve in the new situation. That means fresh invention as well as discernment.
There is plenty of work to do.
And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.