The Church, big and little "C"

The other day I told my wife that I’m ready to be a non-attending member of somebody else’s church. I really wonder sometimes if we might be better off as “post-church Jesus followers”, meeting in homes or parks whenever we felt like it. I know there are folks out there who do just that. I sympathize with them and, sometimes, envy them. Church is hard work, especially on the personal, and interpersonal, level. Then there’s the wider scope of the Church, big C. It’s not easy talking about the Church, especially now, what with all those scandals and our postmodern suspicion of any overarching reality. The Church is what we want to leave, not what we want to flee toward. At least, that’s how I feel. After ten years in ministry, I’m ready for a break.

But I can’t just walk away from the Church, big C. If God will work at all, it’s mainly going to be through the Church. I say mainly because there are plenty of places where God is working that ain’t the Church. God’s Work isn’t contained within the Church; the Church is contained within the Work. But by and large, if you see good things happening around the world, chances are that somewhere in it there are Christians supporting, initiating, questioning, sweating, dying, praying and celebrating. That’s just who we are. That’s the Church. Wherever justice is served, wherever compassion is done, wherever lives are reordered and the current order of things is resisted, the Spirit of Jesus is in the thick of it. And wherever you can find the Spirit of Jesus, you’ll find the Church.

Defining Church so broadly might seem like a cop-out, like liberal optimism better suited for the world of a hundred years ago, or like another form of imperialism. It’s like saying, “See, that’s ours, too.” It would be imperial, if I were saying, “Ours.” But I’m not saying that. I’m saying that justice and mercy and compassion and all the rest are God’s domain, and that whenever we tread into the territory of mercy or compassion, we’re on God’s ground. God is not territorial like we are, and does not resent intrusions, but rather welcomes guests like family. Further, since God acts in other-oriented love, the justice of God is not self-serving, but self-giving. God’s people just get to come along and help out.

That’s because of how the Church is structured. Bu structure, I don’t mean the institutional matrix. I mean the organic union of Body with Head. To be a body in this sense is to be like the head. The Church is the incarnational reality of Jesus. The Church, then, takes its cue from what Jesus did, and what Jesus is doing. The Church asks itself, “What would Jesus do?” The WWJD craze shows no sign of abating. When I first started seeing WWJD bracelets and socks and coffee mugs and toilet covers, I was appalled. I was appalled because I don’t know if anyone means it. I still have an ambiguous relationship with it. I don’t think that all these suburban moms and dads who buy their kids the WWJD paraphernalia would really want their kids doing what Jesus would do. Jesus would come over for dinner and tell stories that would probably insult his hosts and befuddle his followers. He would make trouble for his family, who would think he was crazy. He would befriend outcasts, heal the sick, restore relationships, break customs, resist authorities, feed the hungry, raise the dead, and preach good news to prisoners.

And he would die. On the cross Jesus took into himself the sins of the world. Most of us have heard something like that before, but he also took on the oppression of unjust systems, the dehumanizing forces of what St Paul called, “principalities and powers and rulers and authorities” and defeated them. He defeated them because they wore themselves out on him. He outlasted them through his goodness, not through his power. We can agree with St. Augustine that evil is only a shadow from good, not solid in and of itself. Jesus won because the vacuum of evil was compromised by his unmitigated goodness, fully unleashed in his willingness to die.

So, the Church is that people who follows the way of Jesus, in the faith of Jesus, led by the Spirit of Jesus. Because the Church is led by the Spirit of Jesus, we cannot always ask, “What would Jesus do?”, but instead, “What is Jesus doing?” “WIJD” is a dangerous question, because it is so open ended. And because it is nearly always answered from 180 degrees from where we thought we were. The question unsettles, but the answers kill and make alive. Answering that question has led Christians to oppose slavery and to hide Jews and to support environmental reform and to ordain women and to stand in front of guns with open hands and a thousand other “issues” and “causes”. When the Church listens to the Spirit of Jesus, there’s no telling where they will find themselves.

To tell the truth, it’s never been much of a stretch for me to grasp the fullness of the Church, the Body of Christ. I’m not a good postmodernist because I’m OK with the whole cloud of witnesses, the mystical body, the people of God in all times and in all places stuff. It’s not the Church Universal I struggle with; it’s the Church Particular. I look around at all the localized expressions I know, from denominations to little corner congregations, and I wonder.

I wonder how and why God would bother. We’re a bunch of backbiting, exclusivist whiners. My liberal friends are so much smarter and more compassionate than the fundamentalists, and my conservative friends are so much more faithful than those non-Christian liberals. And, of course, I’m better than all those judgmental goobers. The Church Particular, in denominational forms and localized congregations, sometimes seems so full of contradiction and bureaucracy and dysfunction that I can’t believe God could ever use these people.

But in a sense, there is no Universal, only the Particular (oops, slipping pomo). The fullness of the Church, big C, is contained within the church, little c. I hesitate to say that, and I hate the way it looks on the page, but there it is.

I think there are three ways of “doing church”, at least, history shows three wide pictures of what the church particular looks like. In The Beginning there was the tiny band of disciples around Jesus, somewhere between three and five hundred at a time. An intimate band, like a group of disciples and their rabbi, or a philosopher and students. That picture wasn’t uncommon in the early years of the Church movement. Disciples learn from masters in a very different way than the contemporary classroom methodology that permeates everything now, from the corporate world to parenting. They lived together. They ate, slept, and fought over who would clean the bathroom together. The information a teacher, rabbi, had to impart to his disciples couldn’t be separated from the person of the rabbi. Learning happened at many times and in many ways. It was formal and informal; it was information and formation; moral, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual.

But it was different from the traditional rabbi/disciple grouping, too. First, Jesus called his disciples to follow him, and his followers called theirs. Rabbis, on the other hand, were pursued by potential students. That’s not necessarily a hard and fast distinction, the gospels, after all, tell stories of people coming to Jesus to “interview” him as a teacher, but it’s close enough to not be a caricature. Then there’s the gender thing. Rabbis taught men, never women. Today things are different, but Jesus, 2,000 years ago, seems to have had close female followers – disciples. That is apparently unheard of. St. Paul also had no problem identifying women with his own “status” in the community.

Later, after the community had begun to settle a little, it became more of a family. You can see evidence of this shift even in the New Testament. Jesus himself said that anyone who obeys God is his kin. The early Church referred to one another as brother and sister, mother and father. There was continuity with the Roman family system, but radical breaks, too. There was no pater familias, for instance – no one to demand the highest (second to the emperor) honor. In volunteer families, there is a certain kind of fluidity and mutual respect that gets misplaced in many of the more traditional type. There is the kind of love based on give and take and appreciation for the foibles and abilities of the others. The family of Jesus was an amazing thing to its contemporaries because of their willingness to include anyone who wanted inclusion. It didn’t matter what geographical region or social strata a person came from, in the family, they were respected and loved.

It wasn’t long before the family and disciple cohort gave way to institutional hierarchy. It’s easy to lament the advent of and continuing difficulties spawned by the institutional Church, but it happened and continues to preserve elements and resources of the faith, like a safe or a library that we can visit and learn from, even if we’d rather not live there. The institution grew, and grows, out of a kind of survival necessity. If you’re not going forward, you’re going back; whoever’s not busy being born s busy dying; change or die. So, the Church grew up in some ways.

After Constantine, one of the best or worst things to happen to the faith since St. Paul, depending on who you ask, it took on some of the form and function of the dying empire. Appointments to important ecclesiastical posts were as coveted then as governorships had once been. Bishops became the most powerful people in their regions. Disputes over theology and power and control often ended in bloodshed, some of it officially sanctioned.

Sometimes this is laid at the feet of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s an unfair accusation, though. Long before there was a Roman Catholic Church, there was a Church, and then a Western and Eastern Church. The institutionalism of the medieval Church hangs around today. It’s in old line denominations and I suspect we’ll start seeing in entrenching itself even in the cult-of-personality mega-churches, especially as their founders/statesmen begin to die off.

In the medieval institution, interestingly enough, the first two forms were still present, at least in some forms. Familial names were maintained. Parish priests were still Fathers and female leaders were called Mother. Even the Pope’s title comes from the Latin for Father. Little bands formed out in the hinterlands, sometimes intentionally, sometimes as disciples chased down great masters, seeking knowledge and wisdom. They often became families of monks and nuns, ruled by Abbots (Fathers) or Abbesses (Mothers). Members of such communities were Brothers or Sisters. Sometimes men and women even found themselves living side by side in these strange new families.

The same simplifying phenomenon would reassert itself in the turbulent decades after the Reformation, when the Roman Church lost its thousand year monopoly. Freed from religious restraints, imaginations flowered, and groups of every sort of belief and practice sprang into being. Some banded together as families, living communally as the monks had done, but as married, single, old and young.

I often say that the Church is an organic whole, not an institution. I think dichotomies like that are clever. I’m wrong, though, because an organic model and an institutional model have this in common: they’re both organisms. The difference is that institutions are the kind of organisms that exist for the sake of survival. They stop being a resource for God’s work in the world, in the community, and begin to see the community, the world, as a resource for their own survival. Churches that approach their role in the mission like that are not as easy to spot as one might assume. They have wonderful programs and opportunities and missions. They seem to be serving the community, but if you can get their leaders to talk about their work candidly, it’s clear that the programs, missions, and services are hooks for pulling people in. It’s like a good ad campaign for a good product: the consumer will probably benefit from the offered product, and the producer will profit as well. Don’t be fooled, though, producers want to get ahead; they’re not as altruistic as they might first seem. A church like that becomes a kind of monster producing pretty programs as bait for an unsuspecting public. The institution becomes a consumer of consumers.

An organic church, on the other hand, sees itself as an integral part of the community, the world, with more to offer than to give. It is the Body of Christ, broken for the world. An organic church has a good theology of resurrection. It understands that even if it dies, God might not be finished. A good theology of resurrection leads -- not only in church thinking, but in all thinking and faithful living – to a good theology of death. Death is a nuisance, a pest, but never the final word. G. K. Chesterton said that a love of life coupled with a complete disregard for safety leads to courage. The Church Universal and Particular, functions in that paradox.

All this leads me to want to say that the Church is a movement. But the other day I was talking to a rabbi, who said that the problem with movements is that as soon as you join one you stop moving. I can live with that caveat, so instead I’ll say that Jesus began a momentum. Where it’s going we can predict by its trajectory, but we can never determine it. Too many unforeseen variables. The momentum carries us, though.

If we can think in dynamic familial terms, with some cousins we don’t know very well and are kind of glad not to, we’ll help the organic momentum continue. If everyone we encounter deserves the old Middle Eastern respect of a father or mother or sister or brother, we’ll recognize the kingdom of God over all. If our mission is not to “expand our territory”, but to be an arm of God’s mission, we’ll retain the necessary humility to “succeed”. If we will see ourselves and our churches and our movements as resources for God’s mission in the world, we won’t become rapacious monsters. And, if we will develop a good resurrection theology, believing in the one whose power raised Jesus from the dead, we will be able to allow our institutions and dreams to die and rise to God’s momentous glory.