Community as Church, Church as Community

Michael Plekon

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725287556
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Parishes of all denominations are in decline, shrinking, closing, dying. We know that there are increasing numbers, young and older, who are religious "nones" and "dones." This book explores why the decline is taking place, why the distancing is going on. But it goes on to examine parishes from all over the country and from various church bodies that are resurrecting. The central theme of death and resurrection shapes the analysis of parishes covered. Parishes are resurrecting by reinventing their ministries, by repurposing their building to better serve their neighborhoods, thus replanting and reconnecting with them. All of this is the Spirit's doing but through the community of sisters and brothers who make up each congregation of faith. Community as the core of church is the other reality shaping the book's reflection. And community, a parish being with those around, living for more than its own survival are visions for going forward. Other aspects of congregational life are also examined, most importantly the pastors--how they serve when budgets shrink, how they are trained, how pastors act with the community not above it. No recipes are suggested for parish resurrection, but the stories of the parishes that have revived bear within numerous lessons for us in the future.

Chapter 1

Community and Church, Church and Community

The church is the communion of the whole world.1

First, Church

One has to start with Jesus in talking about the church. This goes without saying. Or does it? I myself have heard others balk at being asked what Jesus might say about a particular church situation. “Don’t bring him into it. This is about the chain of command, the rules, tradition.”

I think Rowan Williams knows something about Jesus and the church. A priest for over forty years, almost thirty years a bishop, formerly archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world Anglican Communion, a prolific writer and professor at both Oxford and Cambridge, one suspects he knows a bit about both Jesus and the church.

Williams has a striking description of how all we know and can say about Jesus comes into being. This is talk about Christ, “Christology” being the technical term. What we know of Jesus is by no means just the product and preserve of academic specialists—theologians, in their books, papers, and lectures. At the end of a challenging study about what we can know and say about Christ, Williams is suddenly clear and simple.

Forget all the schools of thought and doctrines of the past two thousand years. Williams places us right in the midst of a community on a Sunday morning. People are singing, praying, listening to the Scriptures being read; they are gathered around the bread and cup and then carrying what they receive into their homes, schools, workplaces, everywhere, in everyday life.

All that can be said about Jesus is embodied by the community who continue to follow after him:

Christology, in short, is “done” by the Church; it is done in the practice of a community that understands itself to be the Body of Christ, a group of persons living and acting from the conviction that human community is most fully realized in the unconditional mutuality which is represented by the language of organic interdependence. Christology is done in the practice of lives that embrace their finitude and materiality without fear, lives that enact the divine self-identification with those who endure loss, pain, and contempt. Christology is done in a practice of prayer and worship that does not approach God as a distant and distinct individual with a will to which mine must conform—as if in a finite relation of slave to master—but acts out of the recognition of adoptive filiation and the intimacy that flows from this. It is done when we see that the doing of God’s will “in earth as in Heaven” means that the eternal will of God is for the life of the world—that God is “satisfied” when our flourishing is secured.2

In other words, if you want to know who Jesus is, anything important about him, go listen to and go look at those who follow him. They will either tell you all you want to know—or send you running as far away from them (and Jesus) as you can get.

At a time when so many congregations are challenged by decline, shrinkage, and the difficulty of attracting and keeping members, is there a good reason for a book about church?

The point of all that follows here can be put very succinctly.

While church is many things—and community, likewise, includes a great deal—church is essentially the communal experience of God and each other and the area. Church is the household or family of faith: those who are the people of God. And then, the communication and actions of God and God’s people.

Or, the church is best defined as community. Hence the title of this book. We know that church entails community, but I want to argue that church is best understood as a communal reality, as community.

The “Rediscovery” of Church

Religion has been defined as something an individual believes and practices. Accent individual. Alfred North Whitehead put it this way: “Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.”3 “Belief,” often described as adherence to various doctrines or teachings, is the very heart of religion. But such an individual focus ignores most of what passes for religion, what is visible, namely ritual, sacred texts, places, and feasts, not to mention rules and histories of important figures and events. In other words, religion is far from an individual pursuit but inherently communal, shared, touching every aspect of life from the economy and political order to food and family, marriage, sexuality, and of course birth and death.

It might seem peculiar that with “church” being such a common expression of public and group religiosity that somehow the communal core would have been eclipsed or forgotten. Yet many agree that there was a profound and transforming “rediscovery” of the church in the last century. The appearance of the ecumenical movement, early in the twentieth century, due to many clashes of churches in missionary efforts, is seen as a crucial impetus for reflecting on what divides and what unites Christians.

Looking back, it is clear that the ecumenical meetings held in Edinburgh in 1927 and Lausanne in 1937 and which led to the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948 were more than academic gatherings. In these meetings, there were powerful experiences of other Christians as sisters and brothers. Old stereotypes and divisions had obscured much of the faith that was still held in common. The sheer diversity of these gatherings, including for the first time many of the Eastern churches, was also a recognition of the global expanse of the gospel, moreover its inculturation in a stunning array of languages, music, liturgies, art, and customs. Instead of being divided Christians, disciples of Jesus began to experience that they were all one in the Lord and in the church.

In subsequent decades, the liturgical movement and the broader “return to the sources” (ressourcement) of the liturgy, Scriptures, early Christian writers, and saints was also part of the rediscovery of the church. This is not the church of canon law or the church of bishops or that even of dogma and doctrine. Rather it is the ancient, scriptural sense of church as “the people of God,” as a communion or community rooted in baptism that does not simply wash away the sin of each individual but reveals all as sisters and brothers in the Lord. Nicholas Afanasiev described this as “eucharistic ecclesiology.” Thus, “the eucharist makes the church and the church makes the eucharist,” as Henri de Lubac put it. The church and eucharist are the gathering and action of all.4

Rediscovery of the Church in the Early Church

Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) was a specialist in the church councils and the canons or rulings they issued. He also studied the liturgical rites and history of the church as well as the New Testament and early church writings of the apostolic and patristic periods. He was a renaissance scholar, an expert in so many areas. In his major study, he returned to the church of the first few centuries in order to establish the essential components of the Christian community. While even into the twentieth century, in both the Western and Eastern churches, the church was defined in terms of the councils, the canons, the bishops, and the church’s organizational, that is, institutional structures, Afanasiev took a more basic approach. It was one that had been promoted by an ecumenical array of scholars from the late-nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, many of these being students of the liturgy, its origins, and development. Variously known as nouvelle théologie or the ressourcement movement, it included renowned figures such as Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Louis Bouyer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, to name a few.

Afanasiev, following the Acts of the Apostles, the apostolic letters, and the postapostolic writings, rediscovered the church as community. He saw the church not essentially in the great patriarchates and state-derived apparatus of dioceses and provinces but in the local assembly, the community of baptized believers. The gathering, the assembly of the people of God, defines and expresses what the church is. The people gathered around the table of the Lord. They were united in prayer, the reading and preaching of the Scriptures, in giving thanks, in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of it and the cup. This was not only a cultic gathering but a community which in turn spread their good news and engaged in the doing of works of lovingkindness.

Afanasiev stresses that by baptism there was a consecration of the faithful, the laity, to be prophets, priests, and kings. There was no original separation of priests and laity. The community identified leaders from their number, set them apart, and ordained them. These eventually became the ministries of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. The chosen and consecrated leaders remained members of the community and the relationships were ones of reciprocal love and service. At the conclusion of the first volume, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Afanasiev makes a forceful claim that the only power or rule in the church is that of love, not law (vlast’ lyubvi). Later, law emerged as the framework of the church’s structure and life. What had originally been a sacred community becam...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Meal for Sinners
• Chapter 1: Community and Church, Church and Community
• Chapter 2: America’s Changing Face(s)
• Chapter 3: Community Death and Resurrection
• Chapter 4: More Resurrection
• Chapter 5: Resurrection in Parishes Relocating and Restructuring
• Chapter 6: Resurrection and the Small Church
• Chapter 7: Visions Going Forward
• Epilogue: The Pandemic, the Anti-racism Movement, and After
• Bibliography