Refining Christ’s Church

Informal Christianity reviews the personal and informal realities involved in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that provide the foundation of Christianity. It deals with personal discipleship, what it means to be born again, to live in regeneration through the Holy Spirit in a way that produces a genuine spiritual life in Christ. If spiritual discipline does not begin in one’s own heart, it doesn’t begin at all.

Where the internal and subjective realities of regeneration are absent from the lives of church members, churches find themselves on a foundation of sand. Such churches turn away from the heart of Christianity — doctrine and theology — to focus on peripheral concerns of administration and maintenance. Christians and churches that do not enthusiastically embrace biblical doctrine and theology as the life-blood of faithfulness, tend to spend their time and energy polishing the outside of the cup (Matthew 23:25). Such efforts concern themselves with church growth — noses and nickels — rather than Christian maturity (Ephesians 4:13).

Informal Christianity aims to drive a nail through the heart of such trivial indulgence on the part of those who fail to live up to the potential of their Christian calling because such a failure amounts to the denial of the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in their own lives. Yes, the flesh is weak, no one is disputing that. But “the spirit indeed is willing” (Matthew 26:41). Christians “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon” (Act 1:8) them. Such power is the “strength that God supplies” (1 Peter 4:11). Thus, to wallow in administrative trivialities is to deny the power of God (Mark 12:24) and to deny one’s citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

While great effort is being poured into the administrative expansion of churches (church growth), the very heart of personal faithfulness is being ignored, denied, denigrated and trivialized by the very principles that have been adopted to generate such growth. The proper priorities and first things (Matthew 6:33) are giving way to the “wisdom of men” (1 Corinthians 2:5). Informal Christianity cuts through the trees that have become veritable logs in the eyes of contemporary Christians to reveal again the forest of faithfulness in which the life of Christianity dwells.

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Christians are called to be Christian informally before they engage a formal relationship with other Christians through church membership. Church leaders and pastors are in the position to see how Christian theology impacts the life and well-being of the church. If there is conflict in your heart or your church, you need to read this book. And if there isn’t, you need to reread 1 John.

Christian seminary students and church leaders (pastors and elders) will find a renewed understanding of the historic, Protestant perspective and see how it insists that people are Christian before they become church members.