The Essential Church

We’ve got some good news and bad news. And since psychology says you should deliver the bad news first, here goes. 

The Western world is becoming more and more post-Christian. “Nones,” or those who do not ascribe to any religion, have increased dramatically in the last decade, making up 26% of the U.S. population. In addition, Stanford University is reporting that Gen Z is the least religious generation in American history. 

Adding to this religious climate of uncertainty, COVID-19 will most likely exponentially escalate the decline of organized religious life. A recent study by The Religious News Service reveals that 65% of churches are experiencing decreased giving, leading experts to believe 30% of churches across America may never reopen due to the financial fallout from the ongoing pandemic. Smaller congregations consisting of  predominantly elderly members have been especially crippled by the virus. 

Plus, the inability to attract healthy members back through the doors after such a long hiatus will be challenging for even the most vibrant churches. And once churches finally reopen, many will refrain from large gatherings, choosing instead to limit who and how many people gather for worship. Many of the pastors we’ve talked with believe we are years away from returning to the traditional church as we knew it. Instead, we might be returning to the essential church as only Jesus’ early followers knew it. 

And that just may be good news indeed. 

For the last 1,400 years, Christians in the western world have relied almost exclusively on the institutional church to provide the spiritual practices, places, experiences, and teachings needed for spiritual fulfillment. Trained pastors and priests schooled in church history and theology have been trusted with the role of leading us through word and sacrament into a deeper relationship with Christ. 

But in some ways, we’ve taken their shepherding and pastoring for granted, expecting them to do it all for us. Rather than partnering with the institutional church to bring about God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, we’ve instead outsourced that work to the priestly class, abdicating our responsibility to be the hands and feet of Christ in a hurting world. We give money to the church to help the abstract poor. We assume the pastor is visiting the sick, taking care of the dying, discipling our children, and counseling the single mother. It’s heartbreaking to realize we’ve reduced our understanding of the church to what we do for one hour on Sunday. We gather at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning with like-minded and like-looking fellow citizens in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described as “the most segregated hour in America.” We’ve falsely assumed that gathering in corporate worship each week is enough, that “the Church” is a place instead of a people. As easy as it’s been to function this way, something just feels wrong. 

Thankfully, Church history shows us another path, an ancient way of being the Church that we might need to embrace in our current crisis. And so this week when President Donald Trump announced that churches were “essential” to America’s public life, we whole-heartedly agreed, just maybe for different reasons.

Prior to the state-sanctioned establishment of the institutional church in the 4th century by Emperor Constantine, the followers of Jesus met in diaspora, scattered in marginalized groups, typically meeting in a private home. The “Church” was no more—and frankly no less—than a small band of powerless believers committed first and foremost to each other, as well as to coming together regularly to devote  “themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” 

To sustain their community, we are told in Acts that “all the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need...They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” The Church looked like a rag tag family where everyone knew your name and your story and loved you anyway. Those early followers of Jesus seemed far more concerned about the common good than their own individual rights. They understood love of neighbor as their primary call, and if that meant to defer their own rights, wants, or desires, so be it. In those home churches, women were finally fully human, scandalously seen as equals in a patriarchal world. Wealthy patricians broke bread with slaves and called them brothers. Unwed mothers were provided the resources, support, and healthcare needed to raise their children. The elderly were honored. Widows and orphans were dignified members. There, in those intimate communities, there was no poverty, no hunger, no want, no outcast, no “other.”

In the ancient Roman and modern American Empires, the church was and is truly essential. A church who’s ultimate allegiance is to King Jesus instead of Caesar is essential to real freedom. A prophetic church that speaks truth to power is essential in an age when the church has been reduced to a voting bloc and a political lobby. A church that honors the weak and protects the poor is essential in a land of predatory violence and wanton greed. A church that lives in close proximity to and in solidarity with the marginalized is essential to a world of strict social stratification and classism. A holy, defiant church that makes no peace with oppression is essential in a world ordered by systemic injustice. A church celebrating unity in the midst of diversity is essential in a culture of exclusion and racial divides. The essential church is, in the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, “A church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the Church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”

I get it. Like you, I miss gathering each Sunday with fellow believers. I miss the liturgy, the prayers, the hymns, the stained-glass, the rich sermons, and receiving the Eucharist. I miss hearing my children sing in the kids choir. I miss putting on clothes that aren’t pajama pants. I miss it all. But in this liminal season, instead of lamenting the loss of the Church as we know it, what if we embraced the Church as most of us have never experienced it? What if we redeem this time of social isolation and forced diaspora by living into the ancient ways of our spiritual ancestors by practicing radical (appropriately distanced) hospitality, revolutionary sharing, and intimate belonging? As Madeleine L’Engle writes in The Rock That is Higher, “We shouldn’t wait for the institutions to do the changing, but be willing to change ourselves, for in the end it is we who make up the institution, and if we become more open, more loving, more interdependent through the lavishness of God’s love, then we can and will make a difference.”

Whether you realize it or not, the church was never closed. Sure, the building may be locked but we the people are alive, essential, and at work co-creating a new world. In the days and weeks to come, as the church seeks a return to normal, resist. Instead, claim the creative agency you’ve been given by God to create a new, yet ancient Body of Christ modeling a beautiful and essential way forward. The Church as we knew it may never be the same. And that is some very good news. Amen.