We often look at what one church or even a whole church movement is doing and get excited about their success. They start an Alpha course in a run down estate and see some young single mums start following Jesus, and we think, ‘Great. This is what God is doing these days’. Well, maybe. But what if we – just for a moment – take our eyes off the micro and look at the macro? What if we were to look back across four and five centuries of the broad sweep of church history in the west, what would we find?

I want to offer a hypothesis. It is based on a key I’ve found in Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom (check past postings under Post-Christendom category to the right) where Murray suggests that the church got infected by the Roman Empire back in the fourth century. A central aspect of this infection has been control, with empire having to control the church so that the church did not rock the imperial boat. The result has been ‘Christendom’. But since the 16^th century, Christendom has taken knock after knock and today we stand in a period where it has almost breathed its last breath. With me so far? Good. Now for my hypothesis.

Ever since the Reformation, a call for freedom from control has been working within the church in the west. In the Reformation itself we see Luther, Calvin et al taking the church to task for not allowing the laity to read and interpret the Bible and for the deep divide between clergy and laity etc. Within the reform movement there were other voices (the Anabaptists) who were unhappy that the Magisterial Reformers (e.g. Calvin) were not prepared to follow through their ideas to their logical conclusion and truly free the laity.

Then came the 17^th century and in England and Wales the Puritan movement (was there a similar movement on mainland Europe?), a group who were unhappy with the pace of reform in the Church of England. Some left the church and became what we know as the ‘nonconformists’. They did not want to conform to the rather prescriptive worship practices of the church (plus other things) and so they formed their own ‘free church’ denominations. These free churches really prospered and benefited from the fervour of the Evangelical Revival in the 18^th century. Further revivals in the 1800s were seen as God bringing new life to churches flagging under tradition.

Then comes the 20^th century and the Pentecostal movement with its emphasis on the freedom that the Holy Spirit brings – a freedom to express a love of God in exuberant worship and the exercising of gifts. Within more traditional denominations the charismatic movement breaks-in in the 1960s and many churches split because of the tension between those who want to express this new found freedom and those who want to either control it or want nothing to do with it whatsoever. Indeed one familiar characteristic of the charismatic movement is the splits experienced by churches as some desire to follow through this freedom to a greater extent. ‘Control’ is often the word used to explain why the split took place. In the latter part of the last century and into this one, the emerging church movement (broad though it is) has been experimenting with new ways of being church and often the reason given for this is that the old model was not working since it was not freeing people up to go and be where the unsaved world was.

Today a common phenomenon is the number of believers who are outside church altogether citing ‘control’ as the issue that drove them out. Often, these are often people who are not bitter following bad experiences with church (though some are) but feel that the only way they can express the freedom that the Spirit gives is outside traditional church.

So … to the thesis (at last, I hear you say). Could it be that what the Spirit has been doing for the past five hundred years or so is to call for church to give up control and let freedom rule?

And can we see the same thrust of history in the world of geopolitics in the same period as smaller nations have thrown off the various empires holding them down and emerge into freedom? Think of African nations and the British Empire from the 1950s onwards.

And do both of these things express what is in the heart of God: a desire to ‘free up’ and ‘give away’; while the enemy wants to ‘bring in’ and ‘control’?

Thoughts anybody?