Pastor Lee Griess, Assistant to the Bishop,Nebraska Synod, ELCA, posted a column entry, “We Do Mission!” on one of the synod’s Web sites on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011. In his column, he wrote:

We have to begin doing church differently. We have to recapture the mission of the church, the mission of God found in both the Old and New Testaments as they record God’s intervention with (and for) God’s people. McNeal asserts that the church in North America suffers from a severe case of “mission amnesia.” We have replaced the mission God has given us with a club mentality, the assumption of too many church members that the church exists for them. In The Present Future, McNeal reminds us that Jesus encountered a world with a religious landscape very similar to ours, along with a church that thought it existed to promote the rules important to maintain its existence. That’s why, McNeal says, the movement Jesus initiated had such power – because it had at its core a personal transforming experience of God.

The whole column is worth reading. The more I thought about it, the more I grew concerned about the nature of the ecclesiology that underlies the column. In response, I submitted the following comment to his post. As of Saturday, Feb. 26, the comment is still awaiting moderation.

The Rev. David M. Frye says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
February 22, 2011 at 6:37 pm
There is wisdom in seeing that people do not hear a call from God our Father to prop up the institutional apparatus of the church.

But it is easy, when speaking of the “church culture,” to forget that the Church is the body of Christ, his Bride, and is a reality to which we point when someone says to us, “Show us Christ.” Even in its institutional frailties, its human failures, and its historical fractures the Church remains, somehow—by the grace of the Father, poured out through the Spirit, for the sake of his Son—the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

The mission of God is simply, in the end, that his Church will encompass all who bend the knee at the name of the Son, confessing that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:5–11).