Church Without Walls: A challenging read on evangelism and culture

“As we minister to both the believer and the unbeliever, we can summarize all of this in just one question: Who adjusts to whom? Do those who minister adjust to those to whom they minister, or is it the other way around?” asks Jim Petersen in his book, Church Without Walls, offered by NavPress (available at amazon). 

Gleaning from his decades of experience as a missionary in Brazil, Petersen urges us to reconsider our ideas about what makes church “church” in order to gain and retain relevance to a changing American culture. He sees the church losing ground in contemporary society as the influences of the Enlightenment and modern philosophy drive many people to embrace the values of a relativism that distrusts any institution that claims to have a corner on the truth.

To address the widening worldview gap between the churched and non-churched, Petersen argues for a return to the methods of the early church. The way we view church today, says Petersen, represents a departure from the model of the early church. Cultural pressures triggered the actions of early leaders who reacted to shield the fledgling church from heresy. In the pluralistic intellectual climate near the end of the first century, philosophical ideas such as Neo-Platonism, Manichaeanism, and Gnosticism began to encroach on a pure notion of the gospel. The Church Fathers responded to these and other heresies by adopting creeds that defined the boundaries of orthodoxy and by working “to strengthen the authority and organization of the church.”

Church Without Walls spends many of its pages on the early years of Church history, which, in Petersen’s telling, brought about a fundamental change in the way the body of Christ viewed itself. The writings of Church Fathers like Irenaeus, Cyrian, and Augustine, “shifted [the] paradigms, from church as community to church as institution.” The end result was that the church’s “white-hot convictions…cooled down and became crystallized codes…The horizon was no longer the world but the boundaries of the local parish.” In an effort to set barriers to keep heresy out and believers in, the dynamic network of the early believers calcified a Church with walls.

Petersen says that, while the Reformation served us well by returning Scripture to its rightful place of authority for believers, the reforms did not go far enough. Church remains an institution rather than a community, the perceived split between professional church ministers and laity remains largely in tact, and the paradigm of the church as a place to go rather than a fellowship in which to participate remains the norm. He writes that, “the believer is strategically positioned inside the marketplace…The believer is the key to penetrating our society. The primary function of leadership should be to serve those believers by equipping them for ministry.” We have created enclaves of Christian culture inside the walls of our churches when we ought to, instead, be living up to our rolls as ambassadors to a society that may never set foot in a church building.

According to Petersen, the traffic flow at many local churches is running in the wrong direction. Rather than the goal being to get the unsaved to walk down the isle, Christian leaders and laypeople need to focus on preparing believers to walk up the isle, out the door, and into the circles of influence where their voice matters. Individual believers’ mission is to evangelize. The church's task is needs to equip and support. 

As someone training for ministry, that model requires a new way of thinking. It takes humility to not try to grow the biggest church you can so you can impress the masses with state-of-the-art facilities and publishing deals. It will take that kind of humility for the church to regain its place of esteem in our society again. Our culture is changing. Who needs to adjust? We do. The message is timeless, but the methods should fit the people we are trying to reach.

Students of church history may be surprised at Petersen’s less than favorable review of some of the early church fathers. Yet, his critiques are kind and well-documented and his approachable style makes Church Without Walls a readable primer on church history and evangelism. It is not an easy read, however. Challenging and direct, Church Without Walls lays a new, thought provoking course for the American church.