Dear people of Grace,
There are a series of questions which I am sometimes asked which relate to our participation in church. Why do we go to church? We are Christians, yes, but why do we go to church week after week and say the same liturgy, time after time? Do I have to go to church to be a Christian?
One of the many paradoxes in the Christian life is that our faith is both profoundly personal and undeniably communal at the same time. Faith is personal in that we each have a relationship with God, an intimate bond with our Creator, who “formed my inward parts; [who] knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps 139.13). Faith is also public in that we are called into community with other believers. After the forty days in the wilderness, Jesus was seldom alone again during his ministry, instead constantly drawing his followers together, often over a meal. Similarly the Acts of the Apostles is a continuous narrative of how the apostles formed believers into worshipping communities: “All who believed were together and had all things in common…and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2.44, 47).
This paradox, of faith as both personal and corporate (public), is a spiritual mirror of our worldly lives. We live in a society, to which we (mostly) conform and rely on for security, justice and education among other public goods. Within that society we are free to lead our individual lives as we see fit, each contributing, in our own way, something back for the good of the whole. We are individuals, but only because there is a broader society to which we belong which allows us the freedom to express our individuality.
To reframe it slightly, Plato (in Laws, Book IX) suggests that we are created for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of us. Now our post-modern worldview grates against this, but it is broadly true, even if we like to pretend it isn’t.
This is equally true of our life in the Church. While we experience a personal faith, we can only do so because there is a common, catholic faith which undergirds it. We hear St. Paul express this in his imagery of the Body of Christ, of which I’ve written before. “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Rom 12.5). Just as St. Paul suggests that one part of the body cannot say “I have no need of you,” (1Cor 12.21) to another, so equally a part of the body cannot then say, ‘I have no need of the body, I’m staying home today!’ If we choose the Christian life, we cannot refuse to be a part of the Body of Christ. This weighs heavily against the idea of the solitary Christian. To practice Christianity is to keep these two elements in tension – a personal faith expressed actively within a community of believers.
Christians have always observed a weekly remembrance of Easter, in the liturgy of our Sunday worship. In answer to my original question it is important to note that, in the words of Roman Catholic theologian Aidan Kavanagh (1929-2006), the church does not assemble for the sake of meeting with itself, it is not self-serving. Rather, the church “enacts itself publicly for the life of the world” (Elements of Rite, p.45). In other words, individual members bring the world with them into the church, and each week Jesus’ work of redemption and restoration is proclaimed and enacted. What we see in the liturgy is a glimpse of the world as God wills it to be. We take that glimpse of the kingdom of God back out into the world with us each week. When we look at it from that perspective, we immediately see the importance of meeting together regularly. It may be the same liturgy each week, but the piece of the world we bring with us is slightly different; the concerns of the world are new.
We are about to enter a season of Stewardship, where we consider how our individual gifts fit within the broader Body of Christ, the corporate body. In order to look earnestly at our place in the Body, we must first of all recognize the necessity of our participation in the weekly remembrance of our Lord.
I look forward to seeing you on Sunday!
Blessings and peace,
Deacon Nick