What is Church for?
While I don’t think a utilitarian view of religion is always helpful, I do think it is a good idea to occasionally ask ourselves - both individually and collectively - what we think Church is for. What comes to mind when we ask such a question? Do we come to Church to be fed and sustained, or transformed and made new? What is the work of the Church throughout the week, not only on Sunday morning?
One way of understanding the Church emphasizes our individual faith. We come to Church to be filled and formed, but our spirituality is primarily a matter of personal piety and how we live it out in the world is up to us. This way of understanding Church lends itself to a specific understanding of salvation that emphasizes a personal relationship with God above all else and frames redemption as an individual affair, while also pointing to “heaven” as a reward for those who live faithfully here on earth.
This understanding of Church, while popular today, is largely absent in scripture and in the two thousand years of Christian history. It is an innovation that emerged not out of our religious history but out of our national story, the beating heart of a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “city on a hill” Protestant puritanism that is peculiarly American, though it has now spread around the world. The teachings of scripture very rarely address us as individuals. They seem to assume that readers are receiving the teachings of God in community and that they will live out these teachings in webs of relationships that are as oriented toward the transformation of the world as the transformation of our souls. The Hebrew Scriptures mostly address the whole of Israel - a people, not a person. The New Testament is largely made up of letters addressed not to individual people but to nascent communities of Christians who have covenanted together to follow “the way” of Jesus (these groups did not understand themselves as Churches, per se, but as “people of the way,” or followers of the example of Jesus).
Saint Paul gives us the image of the “body of Christ” as a metaphor for the Church:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.
(1 Corinthians 12:12-14)
How differently do we understand Church when we think of ourselves as members of a body, to whom billions of others and even the saints who have gone before us belong? When our response to the very question of what the Church is for begins not with me but with we? One thing this centers is that the love and liberation we receive from God are never meant to be enjoyed apart from others, and indeed inherent in them is an obligation to share such love and liberation with others. Notice how this description of the body of Christ also point us to the breaking down of worldly divisions such as the ethnic divide between Jews and Greeks or, in our time, those of different faiths and races, or the economic and political distinction between those considered slaves and free. Whenever and wherever we see these distinctions breaking down in the world, we know that this is God working in our midst. The Church, then, is called not only to form faithful individual disciples of Jesus but also to knit each of us into the very life of God, who is always remaking and redeeming the world.
Think also of how we hear scripture differently when we hear it addressed to us as individuals or to us as a people. The Ten Commandments offer a wonderful text for this exercise. If we hear these as addressed to us as individuals, they sound quite accessible: do not murder; do not worship idols; do not steal; do not covet. But if we hear them as collective moral guidance, they take on a different weight. If God says to us as a people, “do not kill,” then this has serious implications on our collective understanding of criminal justice, the death penalty, and our societies’ justifications for war. If God says to us as a people, “do not worship idols,” then we have to think seriously about everything that comes before God in our lives. Is it possible that our jobs have become idols? Our savings accounts? Our families? Even our religious institutions? If God says to us as a people, “do not steal,” then we need to think seriously about international trade agreements, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the histories of genocide and systemic racism that involved the pillaging of wealth and the destruction of lives for the profit of a few. If God says to us as a people, “do not covet,” then we must reevaluate our entire economy, and especially marketing and advertising, which are in fact based on coveting, i.e. cultivating a longing for things and experiences we need less than we think we need them.
As Episcopalians, we often seek a “middle way” in matters both of theology and spiritual practice. The Protestant threads of our heritage can land too firmly on a personal faith devoid of obligations to service on behalf of others, whereas the Catholic ones can so envelope us in a collective that we lose sight of our particular gifts and calling. I recently heard a Jewish teacher share a reminder handed down to her from her tradition, which is that we humans must learn to hold two very different truths at the same time. On the one hand, we hold fast to the reality that we are beloved of God, utterly unique, created in the image of the divine and precious in God’s sight. In the other, we hold the reality that we are stardust, just like everyone else. We need these different reminders in different seasons of our lives to center and reorient us, and the Church reminds us of both.
I wrote in my last blog about the distinction between Churches that emphasizes common prayer and those that emphasize common belief. Because we do not ascribe to the idea that there is always a single right way to think or act in the world, and because we recognize that context and relationships influence what might be the most faithful response to any given situation, I believe a large part of what the Church “is for” is to support us - each of us, and all together - in staying in active discernment, day by day. To be in discernment is to be always listening for God’s voice and God’s guidance, to assume that God does not call us once and for all but over and over again, and that a life lived in God is a life attuned to God’s voice and responsive to God’s invitations. What is Church for? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, too.