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Most pastors serving congregations today cannot remember a time before the realities of denominational decline. For several decades now in the mainline church, little has changed, and emptying sanctuaries, shrinking budgets, and closing congregations are part of our daily experience. What does Jones bring to the conversation in this book that’s different for those concerned for ecclesial vitality? The Reconstruction of the Church holds more than just another set of tactics, Jones sets out to pour a new foundation and take things in the church “down to the studs,” in order to build something very old, but in this moment, very new. The Reconstruction of the Church is in a league of its own. It’s like nothing you have read before!
– Jeffrey Conklin-Miller, Th.D., Director of the Methodist House of Studies, Assistant Professor and Teaching Fellow, Duke University Divinity School, Durham, NC
Most pastors serving congregations today cannot remember a time before the realities of denominational decline. For several decades now in the mainline church, little has changed, and emptying sanctuaries, shrinking budgets, and closing congregations are part of our daily experience. What has changed, however, is our precision in describing the factors fueling this story of decline. Sociological studies show decreasing birth rates leaving empty Sunday school rooms and growing numbers of the disaffected and disinterested, the so-called “nones,” absent from the church. Those left behind have been formed in what has been called a “moralistic therapeutic deism,” lacking robust faith, a clear sense of baptismal vocation, and energy to join the Spirit in the missio Dei. Perhaps more than ever, we are able to put words to describe the complicated set of reasons congregations are shrinking and people are leaving the Christian faith and not coming back.
As Jason Vickers notes, in such times of ecclesial anxiety, it comes as no surprise that campaigns promising the secret of church “renewal” increasingly draw the attention of pastoral leaders hoping and seeking to serve vital congregations. From the purpose driven movement to the church growth movement, from proponents of the organic church, the liquid church, the sticky church, and the tribal church, contemporary pastors have an almost overwhelming number of diagnostic and programmatic options offering a way to new life for the church in the world.
But renewal, of course, is predicated on the possibility that what “is” might be improved by a return to what “was.” New life in the church comes through a reclamation, a recovery, a reinstatement of an earlier faithfulness. It might be easy to believe that The Reconstruction of the Church is yet another one of these. But I think such a reading would be a mistake.
There is something more fundamental going on in this book. What Jones brings to those concerned for ecclesial vitality is not another set of tactics for institutional reinvigoration. The title of the book gives it away: Jones seeks not the renewal, but the reconstruction of the church. This is a book less about the redecoration or renovation of the existing structures and cultures of the church. Instead, Jones sets out to pour a new foundation and take things in the church “down to the studs,” in order to build something very old, but in this moment, very new.
This more fundamental, or we might say “radical,” engagement with the life and nature of the church leads to a series of challenging proposals that, if truly embodied, would remake the identity and agency of the church in the world. Let me suggest that this is at once the book’s greatest strength and its most significant weakness. The power of the vision Jones offers, while articulated nearly fifty years ago, still feels needful in the current moment. We long for a church unified by its generous, graceful life, following in the way of Jesus Christ, and embodying glimpses of his Kingdom now. At the same time, this vision is the book’s greatest weakness, just to the extent that it may be (and likely has been) too easily dismissed, set aside as too unrealistic, too idealistic, and too radical.
Such a conclusion would be right, however, at least in describing Jones’ vision as “radical.” This is because such radical vision characterizes Jones’ understanding of Jesus and his Kingdom. Here I draw from William Kostlevy’s characterization of Jones as a “holiness radical,” developed from consideration of Jones’ engagements with global political and economic challenges in the broader course of his writing and public witness. Here, Kostlevy suggests that Jones offered a “utopian social vision with a clear strategy suggesting alternatives to both Fascism and Communism.” Of course, such radical offers were often dismissed by others, but Kostlevy makes the crucial point that what Jones articulated “was not pie in the sky eschatological fantasy. It was far worse. It proposed actually living in history in light of the teachings and values of Jesus.” This is the Kingdom of God understood as a “literal reality occurring on earth among those now living . . . a Kingdom without poverty, classes and sickness inaugurated by the Lord’s Jubilee and empowered not by human effort but the Spirit of God.” We can detect such commitment in some of Jones’ earlier writings, particularly in a book written thirty years before Reconstruction, where his title plainly asked, “Is the Kingdom of God Realism?” The answer to that question was not only “yes,” but, in the words he ends the book with, “the Kingdom of God is the only Realism.”
This focus on a radical “realism” is the key, I think, to understanding the power of this book. For Jones, the church is called to nothing less than a shared life in community aligned with what he refers to more than once as the “grain of the universe,” the heart of everything that is “which is working for Christ and with Christ.” This is not a new vision from Jones. As he wrote in 1940, the Kingdom of God “is not something that we can take or leave alone. For it stands before us—and in us—as Destiny. It is the way that we are made to live, and to try to live some other way is not only foolish but impossible. You cannot live against life and get away with it.” In other words, Jones’ proposal for the Reconstruction of the church is grounded on no less than an apocalyptic vision of creation, Christ, and Kingdom, and it is only inside this eschatological frame that the church finds its faithful place.
Perhaps this is why Jones did not title his book “The Renewal of the Church,” or “The Revival of the Church.” Neither would reflect the radical realist vision being expressed here. It is, instead, a book suggesting an ecclesial revolution. Through the lens of this radical realism, we should read this book’s conclusions and recommendations as means not to the end of congregational vitality, but rather, as invitation to movement “with the grain of the universe.” If this is the case, then we should resist reading this book programmatically, as if it offers a list of initiatives to be developed in congregations by well-meaning task forces and denominational committees. We also cannot read this book as the fruit of one concerned only with “evangelism,” if “evangelism” refers to practices concerned with the conversion and ormation of spiritual lives, somehow separable from concerns with the economic and political impact on lives.
This is not what we find in this book. As Jones, writes, the church is called . . . to preach the gospel to the poor (the economically disinherited); . . . to preach deliverance to the captives (the socially and politically disinherited), and recovering of sight to the blind (the physically disinherited), to set at liberty . . . them that are bruised (the morally and spiritually disinherited,) to proclaim the Lord’s year of Jubilee . . . Here the economic, the social and political, the physical, the moral and spiritual, and the collective were to be redeemed—the whole of life.
What Jones offers us here is a recovery of a vision of church and mission that reflects holistic concern for bodies and souls, for personal and corporate transformation, for liberation and salvation in spiritual, political, and economic dimensions, in history, even now.
This is not idealism. He speaks of a church that understands it cannot be the church, it cannot be a sign that points to the Kingdom, if it does not engage with the divisions, the sin, it also bears as part of this world. Thus, Jones clarifies that this must be a church that sustains a tireless desire to engage and overcome the divisions introduced by unquestioned racial division, economic and class inequality, ecclesial institutionalization, and ministerial professionalization.
Given all this, one may wonder whether contemporary congregations (and denominations in conflict!) can bear the revolutionary, radical realism Jones offers. If Christ and the Kingdom live at the heart of the church, what might be different? When we reach out to start new churches, are we guided by the commitments we hear about in this book? Can we hope for a future reconstruction of a church truly one, holy, catholic, and apostolic?
Such questions, however, should not limit our hope, if it is rightly placed in the One who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Jones points us, again, to the way it is and invites us to walk that path together. The church today requires nothing more than that.
Had I known this book was being re-released, I would have avoided the effort to write my own. A couple of years ago, my publisher wanted me to write about the future of seminaries as The United Methodist Church goes through an internal struggle about what we are and where we’re going. That led me to describe the kind of church we were hoping to shape and serve at Wesley and the kind of seminary we should become. I think I could have just recommended re-reading The Reconstruction of the Church, or included it as the first half of my book. Separated by 50 years, it would still work.
I might have wondered what E. Stanley Jones would think about our current struggles in The United Methodist Church, were he alive today. But I know because his chapter, “A Church That Holds Together Difference,” contains insights which are fresh and clear and relevant. Ironically, either side of our present divide could appeal to Jones because both are heirs to Jones’ legacy. I think of us as progressive evangelicals, he combines “radicals” and “conservatives,” as a necessary balance for Christian faith. Of course, Jones paints his picture on a much bigger canvas than one denomination. And he concludes with a chapter asking, “What About the Unity of Churches?” His answer, and Jones is never without a confident proposal, seeks to strike a “federalist” balance between unity and diversity. Not unlike the proposals being floated in his and my denomination at this writing. I can’t help but see him as essentially Wesleyan and Methodist, namesake of the E. Stanley Jones Professorships of Evangelism at many Methodist institutions, including ours, Jones and mine.
I rediscovered and reappraised E. Stanley Jones in seminary. I already knew the name because my grandmother had all his books. But I never read them because I thought they were just like the Upper Room magazine she kept in the bathroom we shared. I should have read those in addition to Boys Life. But I would not have understood the importance of Jones work then. Instead, I encountered him, again vicariously at Wesley Theological Seminary, through his daughter and son-in-law, Eunice and Bishop James Mathews. I heard many stories of Jones, and his wife, and the unheralded but equally fascinating Mabel Lossing Jones. But I really only started reading him when his granddaughter, Anne Mathews-Younes, curated some of his sermons as part of her seminary studies. Frankly, I thereby discovered my grandmother’s faith was more like mine than I thought.
It seems every time we set out to re-think church, whether in books and liturgy; or evangelical revival, denominational schism, or renewal, it is an exercise in “Let’s do it right THIS time.” (Or, “Let’s do it RIGHT this time.”) We look for a firm foundation in our beginning, and wisdom in our first family of disciples, in order to reconstruct the church. Jones takes the example of the new community in Antioch, contrasting with the church in Jerusalem. It is a familiar contrast, challenged sometimes by biblical scholars, but which serves to set up a useful archetype. Foremost for Jones is that the laity initiated and led that community and grew their own leadership. Even though I am a seminary president, I share what I think is his aversion to the mindset of settled clergy who believe renewal will come through everyone else.
Jones admires Antioch as a caring and classless church, which held together difference. An evangelist more than a pastor; an artist more than an architect, this is an idealistic book. As it should be. And it comes at the end of his life and feels like a “summative ecclesiology.” Though he’d never use such hidebound phrases. It reads with the natural flow of a man who has spent his life preaching.
You may find some dated illustrations and set aside the exclusive language of the time. Jones contrasts Christianity with both “secularism” and “Communism.” He was writing from Cochin, India in 1970, which was then under a communist government. When I was there a few years ago, the city was under the same party’s control. “Secularism” is even more a competing ideology for Christians today. It is not hard to imagine how Jones’ thinking would have changed had he lived another 50 years. I think he could have been just as persuasive to the “Nones” today – those who describe their religion as “None” – as he was to Indian Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Jains of his time.
The Reconstruction of the Church – On What Pattern? I confess, I appreciate this book most because the “pattern” is based on the essential good news of the Christian faith. One of my seminary professors used to describe the arrogant theologian who began his declarations saying, “As Jesus says, and I agree with him…” What is the good news? Jesus said, it is the Kingdom of God, which is “at hand.” This is the foundation of the church Jones envisions and for him, Jesus, is ‘the Kingdom embodied and illustrated.” And I agree. In this kingdom, love of God and love of neighbour, personal and social holiness, saving Gospel and social Gospel cohere.
Nowadays, the phrase “mission evangelism” is used to describe this combination. A phrase E. Stanley Jones would find redundant. Instead, he preaches “redemption.” Jones’ vision of the reconstructed church is “the joyous contagious way of redemptive love.” All his books and sermons have that urgent, feeling calling for a response. That is to say, they are “evangelical.” This is a book for those who care about the future of the church. Jones’ charge to us is: In the church of the future the most important test of its power will be its capacity to win the two thirds of its membership who are caught in eddies of the inconsequential and the marginal, and are going round and round, getting nowhere and producing little or nothing – except motion. This group is the greatest mission field of the church. It must be changed from a field for evangelism into a force for evangelism.
David McAllister-Wilson (get title). He is the president of Wesley Theological Seminary.
When I first began reading this classic book by E. Stanley Jones, I found myself going back several times to see if the original publishing date was correct. There it was in black and white, 1970. But the more I read I was more and more convinced that, while written in 1970, E. Stanley Jones was speaking to the church in 2020. This book is as timely as the day it was written, and offers a pathway forward for churches ready to live into a new future and make a difference in the world.
Jones begins with the central criticism of the church, the issue of relevancy. He then suggests that for the church to be relevant in the world today we should look toward the pattern of the church at Antioch as described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. The remainder of this amazing work is Jones laying out the pattern of the Antioch church and how it is applicable to the church today. Jones has a gift for taking complex theological issues and making them so simple in understanding and application. As he breaks down the practices of the Antioch church, I found myself saying, “Yes! I want to be part of a church like that!”
The pattern of the church at Antioch invites those of us in the clergy to coach and empower the laity. Laypersons, filled with the Holy Spirit, and a passion to share the good news are unleashed into the world to live the faith in action. Jones actually believes that the church is big enough to have room for people of differing cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, with differing opinions, to work together in the cause of Christ. What a witness this would be in a divided world!
Imagine what would happen if churches took seriously this pattern of the Antioch church. Jones addresses so much of what is wrong with the church today, and offers us a way to live as Christians and to make Christ known in our world today. I hope you the reader will enjoy this book as much as I have, as it challenges all of us to be a part of this vital and universal church that puts love in action.
Dr. Clayton Oliphint
First United Methodist Church
Richardson, TX
