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3 Questions About The Church: David Park

// February 5th, 2010 // church, church relevance

David Park’s twitter bio says it best: I dream about Asian-American culture and the church. David has a great insight into the next generation of church and how Asian-Americans can collectively influence the church culture in America. He hosts the Next Gener.Asian Church blog and is the most eloquent authority on Asian-American ministry. David has a love for–and is a student of–the greater church-at-large and lends a great perspective as he answers the three questions below:

1) How would you define the (local) church?

A disclaimer: I’m not particularly fond of my own definition of the local church, but I do think it is realistic and names how the church is viewed by non-Christians and is a good starting point for us to imagine change in the posture and future of the local church. I would define the local church is the organizational container or entity for Christian fellowship. I know we’re trying to stay away from defining the church as a building, but clearly, when we’re talking about a local church, we’re talking about an entity that (hopefully) exists with a particular objective of engaging people in the restorative, salvific, transformative, communal and missional aspects of the Christian faith. I say “hopefully” because not every local church fulfills all of these aspects well, and furthermore, they fail to take into account the strengths of other local churches. In other words, many local churches are limited in its true objective/mission because it is often preoccupied with its own perpetuation and survival.

In an increasingly pluralistic and competitive landscape then, the local church often resorts to diverse expressions and tactics akin to the business world in terms of approaching market segments and developing various products and services. While this might make sense for the survival of organizational entities, it recapitulates the problems we witness in society with perpetuating systemic injustices, tribalism, and consumerism. It is a rare church that can display to the world what reconciliation looks like, or radical generosity, or transformation at the collective level. We take ‘ekkesia’ seriously when we call people out of darkness, but we have difficulty converting this into the ‘apostolic’ dimension of the church in sending people out.

2) Is the church relevant? Why?

Relevance is difficult to achieve at a macro-scale when we tend to create industries and silos to protect ourselves. The world simply is not impressed when we mimic their culture-transforming developments, whether in the arts or in business. The local church has the capacity and potential to be relevant, but many close themselves off from others citing differences in doctrine, in zip code, in politics, in worship style, and a variety of matters that implicitly tell the world that we are not as full of grace as the gospel we proclaim. Choosing our tribe was a luxury in Christendom, but in a web 2.0, globalized, shifting America, we no longer have the space of distancing ourselves from “others”. The Mormon, the Muslim, the Jew, the Hindu, the New Ager, the atheist, and the apathetic are all watching and we simply are playing a game (missiologically speaking) without any sense of gravity to our faith and our witness before the world at our doorstep.

3) Do you see the church looking different in the future? Please explain.

Old habits die hard, but the circumstances and the consequences are dire, so I do hope that churches look different in the future with a greater emphasis on collaboration and reconciliation. The church needs to not gloss over problems of individuals or of the collective, but to invest deeply an embodied doctrine of incarnation. We must recover what it means to be a spectacle, to live a critique against the idols of political power and economic forces, and display healing, hospitality, and care to a greater extent across a wider spectrum of people than before. If the church doesn’t look different in the future, we effectively forfeit our role in shaping and informing the development of Christian witness in the global south and east and their churches.

Learn more of David’s thoughts at his blog: Next Gener.Asian Church or follow him on twitter: @dpark75.