Original Christianity Restored

The Wednesday Compass | The Ruins | May 20

For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and "The Ruins" is one of its recurring series. Every Wednesday it asks what the church was originally built to be — and what it might look like to build something that true again. Not nostalgia. Recovery.

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There is a story about William Penn that I keep returning to, especially in seasons when the church feels like it is struggling to find its way.

Penn was the son of a British admiral. He grew up with a sword on his hip the way other people grow up with a family name. It was just part of who you were, part of the world you belonged to. Status, loyalty, military heritage. The sword said all of that without a word.

Then he started listening to George Fox.

Fox was the kind of person who made the comfortable uncomfortable without trying. He had no patience for the version of Christianity that had fused itself to the English state in the 17th century, to its courts and its class structures and its wars. He kept saying, quietly and at great personal cost, that something had been lost. That the original church Jesus started looked little like the institution that now bore his name. Fox wasn’t angry about this so much as he was clear about it. And clarity, it turns out, is more dangerous than anger.

Penn started attending gatherings where Fox would often speak. He started seeing what Fox was pointing at. And one day he went to Fox with a question that was really a confession: what do I do about this sword I’ve been carrying all my life?

It was a serious question. He wasn’t asking about fashion. He was asking whether following this path meant abandoning everything he had come from, everything his father had given him. The sword was the whole question in one object.

Fox’s answer has stayed with me for years. He said: wear it as long as you must. When you can no longer wear it, discard it. No ultimatum. No litmus test. No demand that Penn prove his sincerity by throwing the sword into the Thames that afternoon. Just: walk with Jesus. Learn how to listen to him. Learn how to think with him. Let the walking change you. When you’ve gone far enough, you’ll know what to put down.

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If you’ve found your way here, welcome. The Compass exists to help you navigate the interior journey, faith lived from the inside out. If this lands somewhere real for you, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and consider becoming a subscriber. Now — let’s keep walking.

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We read in Galatians that when the time was right, God sent his Son. We nod at that, and we make it mainly about the Incarnation. But it was also the right time to launch the church. The timing wasn’t incidental. The world into which Jesus and the church was born was precisely the kind of world that would test whether this thing could survive without becoming something else. The Roman empire didn’t just provide roads for the gospel to travel. It provided every possible pressure to conform, to align, to become useful to the powers that already existed. The church was born into crosshairs. That was part of the design.

The church Jesus launched existed inside one of the most politically charged environments in human history. Roman occupation. Ethnic fracture. Zealots on one side, collaborators on the other, and ordinary people trying to survive in the middle. There was no shortage of pressure to pick a side. And yet the early church didn’t. What it built instead was something that transcended the dominant forces of its moment, not by ignoring them, not by withdrawing from them, but by pointing to a different kind of power altogether.

That original church knew something we have largely forgotten. It was built on an intimate, personal walking relationship with Jesus Christ. Not merely a doctrine about him or a correct belief system. But a direct, abiding relationship where you listened to him and thought with him, so that the shape of his life slowly became the shape of yours. That was the foundation. And from that foundation came the practices that marked the early church as radically different. They prayed. They broke bread together. They shared what they had. They forgave one another. They loved their enemies. They didn’t just believe these things; they did them. On Monday. In the marketplace. When no one was watching. The gap between Sunday confession and Tuesday behavior was nearly invisible, because the relationship with Jesus wasn’t so much a belief as it had become the texture of how you lived.

That is what the original blueprint looked like. And it is what has been largely lost in the cultural and theological ruins of today.

Decades ago, the mainline church in America aligned itself with political liberalism and then later with political and moral progressivism. It became a voting bloc for one side of the political spectrum. Its decline has been steep, and few thinking people could look at it today without seeing that a particular political platform has a loud voice inside those walls.

The more conservative, evangelical church has done the same thing from the other direction. It has aligned with a particular political vision. It has become a voting bloc for the other side. Its vitality is in question, and few thinking people could look at it today without seeing that another political platform has an equally loud voice inside those walls.

The original church belonged to neither side. It never did. And when the contemporary church behaves as though it does, it loses the one thing it has that no political party can offer: the capacity to point people toward something that transcends the whole argument.

Penn understood the cost of choosing to walk with Jesus rather than with the powers of his day. He paid for that choice. He spent time in the Tower of London for it.

But Fox didn’t call Penn to tear down the old structure. He called him to walk. The rebuilding happens the way Fox described it: one step at a time, carried forward by something more patient than we are, until eventually you notice that what you’re holding no longer fits who you’ve become.

The ruins are real. But ruins are also where you find the original stones.

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IHG,

— Gene