By John Chandler
My colleague and friend J.R. Woodward, author of Creating a Missional Culture and leader of the V3 church planting movement, was recently leading a “Community of Practice” — a collection of church pastors and leaders working over the course of the year in a peer-learning environment to reframe their congregations toward a discipleship culture.
Woodward rightly insists that discipleship means “out” as well as “up” and “in.” In response to a question about the disappearance of pioneering leaders in the church, he began to talk about the emergence of parachurch movements after World War II. “Parachurch leaders are often the apostles, prophets and evangelists whose voices were not heard in our pastor/teacher-heavy churches. Imagine what could have been if all five of the voices of Ephesians 4 could have led in congregations over the last century!”
Woodward went on to make a fascinating comparison between the words “apostle” and “apostasy.” Both words share a prefix. But where the root of “apostle” designates being “sent,” the root of “apostasy” is the word from which we get our English words “stasis” or “static.” Apostasy, then, is linguistically connected with unmoving fixedness.
Historically, apostasy has meant departing from a fixed canon of belief, stepping outside the acceptable bounds of orthodoxy. But Woodward’s comments unlocked for me what the new face of apostasy is looking like in North America. Amid all the uproar about neo-Calvinism and doctrinal deviations from historic Baptist theology is lost the dominant expression of what it means to be apostate in our culture today. To be apostate in North America more and more will mean to cease being “sent,” to remain unmoving and static, to insist on living up toward God and in toward each other, but never out toward our neighborhood or world.
We are paying the costs of attending only to orthodoxy and never orthopraxy. Who cares if you have a perfect TULIP if no one in your neighborhood can smell the flower? Who cares if you are orthodox or progressive in theology but never practice sharing the gospel? Is this not to apostasize from the faith delivered once and for all to the saints?
We were formed by Jesus to move, to be sent. To refuse to be the apostolic, moving out, sent-into-the-world presence of Christ in our communities and in the world is the emerging apostasy.