Keys to Vital Churches

The following ten “Theses on Renewal” from Liberating the Church summarize my most basic convictions about the nature and calling of the church—and what is needed for its renewal. In more recent books I have amplified some of these points and added other accents (for instance, the importance of a Trinitarian perspective), but virtually everything I have written on the church and the Kingdom of God is contained at least embryonically in these ten theses:

• The fundamental crisis of the church today is a crisis of the Word of God. The church must recover the full dynamic of the Word, not just as Scripture, but as God-in-communication, especially through the written Word of Scripture and supremely through the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. This is another way of saying the church must recover a consciousness of who God is.
  
  
• Behaviors and structures in the church reflect fundamental concepts in the church’s self-understanding which often remain unarticulated.
  
  
• The church is essentially the community of God’s people, not primarily an organization, institution, program, or building. This is a distinction of fundamental importance because it is linked to the basic models of the church which Christians employ.
  
  
• The experience of salvation is incomplete and not fully biblical without genuine experience of the church as the community of God’s people and agent of the Kingdom.
  
  
• The most dynamic and prophetic thing the church can do is first of all to be a worshiping and serving community.
  
  
• Every believer is a minister, servant and priest of God. Every believer is called to ministry, and all God’s people must be equipped to minister.
  
  
• Every believer receives grace for ministry. Therefore spiritual gifts must be identified and employed to God’s glory.
  
  
• Leadership grows out of discipleship. Where careful discipling is lacking, leadership cannot be biblical and a crisis of spiritual leadership results. Worldly qualifications for leadership replace biblical ones.
  
  
• The church’s concern for and identification with the poor are sure signs of its faithfulness to the Kingdom and are often signs of fundamental renewal.
  
  
• In North America today a vital, biblically faithful church will be a countercultural community living in tension with the non-Christian elements of society and marked by a lifestyle that is distinctively Christ-like and Kingdom oriented.
  

Howard A. Snyder, Liberating the Church: The Ecology of Church and Kingdom (InterVarsity Press, 1983), 17-18.