The Local Church Will Be Different
The church at Philippi had been facing opposition.
Paul mentions their opponents clearly in verse 28 — “not frightened in anything by your opponents.” Then he says in verse 30 that the church is engaged in the “same conflict” he’d had (and still has at the time of his writing).
What is that same conflict?
Well, Paul is writing from a Roman prison, because, among other types of opposition, he faced Roman opposition. Paul was causing an uproar among the Jewish nation, turning “the world upside down” and leading a sect that “everywhere is spoken against” (Acts 17:6; 28:22). But the Jewish play was shrewd. They claimed Paul and his fellow missionaries were “all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:7).
(And yes, that’s right — there is a King to whom one day Caesar will bow the knee! That’s what is coming in Philippians 2:10–11!)
But the Romans were paying attention by the year 60. Paul is on lockdown, and the burgeoning church in Philippi, a proud Roman colony, would have turned some heads.
Paul is confident he’ll visit them again, but either way, whether he sees them in person or hears about them, what he wants for this church is for them to stand firm.
Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit …
As I’ll explain briefly on Sunday, God willing, this church’s standing firm in one Spirit (the Holy Spirit), is the manifestation of their living worthy of the gospel.
And “standing firm” is defensive. It means holding your ground. I’ll talk more about that too on Sunday, but the thing I want to highlight today is that this defensive metaphor means, at the least, that local churches are not parrots of the world that surrounds them.
The church is similar to their surrounding world in some ways, and very different from their surrounding world in others.
These two dynamics are what the missiologist Andrew Walls has called the “indigenizing principle” and the “pilgrim principle” (see The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in Transmission of Faith (Mary Knoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001)).
The “indigenzing principle” says:
On the one hand it is of the essence of the Gospel that God accepts us as we are, on the ground of Christ’s work alone, not on the ground of what we have become or are trying to become. But, if He accepts us “as we are” that implies He does not take us as isolated, self-governing units, because we are not. We are conditioned by a particular time and place, by our family and group and society, by “culture” in fact. In Christ God accepts us together with our group relations; with that cultural conditioning that makes us feel at home in one part of human society and less at home in another. . . .
The fact, then, that “if any man is in Christ he is a new creation” does not mean that he starts or continues his life in a vacuum, or that his mind is a blank table. It has been formed by his own culture and history, and since God has accepted him as he is, his Christian mind will continue to be influenced by what was in it before. And this is as true for groups as for persons. All churches are culture churches—including our own. (7-8)
This means that Christians in churches in America will look like other Americans.
But also, there’s the “pilgrim principle.” Walls writes,
But throughout Church history there has been another force in tension with this indigenizing principle, and this also is equally of the Gospel. Not only does God in Christ take people as they are: He takes them in order to transform them into what He wants them to be. Along with the indigenizing principle which makes his faith a place to feel at home, the Christian inherits the pilgrim principle, which whispers to him that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society; for that society never existed, in East or West, ancient time or modern, which would absorb the word of Christ painlessly into its system . . .
Just as the indigenizing principle, itself rooted in the Gospel, associates Christians with the particulars of their culture and group, the pilgrim principle, in tension with the indigenizing and equally of the Gospel, by associating them with things and people outside the culture and group, is in some respects a universalizing factor. (8-9)
This means that Americans in churches in America will look like Christians, no matter how out of the ordinary that might make them.
We are called to stand firm in the Holy Spirit, which means, we’ll be different from the world in very fundamental ways, foremost in who we display as our all-consuming passion and all-satisfying treasure.
More on this Sunday, God willing.
