Ecclesiology Devos

When I was in graduate school, I began to indulge what I thought at the time was only a bad habit. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Chicago, a full time student, a working musician, a part-time library clerk, and a part time teaching assistant. I began to sleep in on Sunday mornings. I often wouldn’t get back from a concert or a late night shift until well after midnight on Saturday, and then I’d make myself a meager dinner and crawl into bed. I wanted to get up for church the next day. I knew that I ought to get up for church. I even liked the church that I was attending. But I didn’t really know anyone there very well, and for one of the few times in my week I had no official responsibilities. So, when my alarm went off at 7 AM, I’d turn it off and sleep in. Was that really so bad?

I’m one of the advisors for the senior class this year…though I should acknowledge that I am by far the lesser advisor, and that Kelly Wendlandt has, to the great advantage of the senior class, taken on the larger part of the responsibilities…and as I watch them stagger bleary-eyed into our homeroom at 8 in the morning, I worry about them a little bit. Next year they’ll be out on their own, most of them far from their home churches and the people who look for them on Sunday mornings. Knowing how hard it is already for them to get up in the morning and to take care of their responsibilities without prompting, it isn’t difficult at all to imagine that a good number of them will not be going to church with any regularity a few months into their freshman year.

I imagine it will look something like this: On their first Sunday on campus, they’ll get up, dress themselves well, and try a local church with which they have some preliminary connection. Perhaps they grew up in the same denomination, or a relative attends there. Over the next few weeks they’ll “church-shop.” (A loathsome term.) Then, as their Saturday nights get later and their dorm bed gets more comfortable, they’ll begin to realize that no one is going to wake them up and force them to go to church in morning. They can save themselves the trouble of getting dressed up and sitting with strangers they don’t know. They can save themselves the trouble of music they don’t like or polite conversations they aren’t interested in. They can even save some gas money, if they have a car, by staying parked on campus. And just like that, they’ll be where I was as a second year graduate student…without any sort of church home, without a pastor, without communion, and without the people of God.

Now, this is a rather glum picture, but we can do something about it. If you’re a parent of one of these students, you can always call on Sunday afternoons and ask how church went that morning. (A guilty conscience got me up on Sunday mornings very quickly when my at-the-time fiancée let me know her displeasure about my little venial sin of sleeping in.) I propose, however, that we can address the problem at a more foundational level. I believe that we ought to be engaging our students with the big questions of ecclesiology—what is “church?” What is “the church?” And why, especially if we’re saved by grace and not by works, does it matter so much if we go or not. I have four points around which we might begin to form an ecclesiology and address these questions.

The fancy classification for the ecclesiology you find among most American protestants is “contractual voluntarism.” Contractual voluntarism is a form of individualism emphasizing private choice. Individual people secure their Christian identity before joining the church by deciding for Christ in response to the gospel, thereby ensuring salvation and a place in heaven. Then, by a subsequent and entirely distinct act of the will, the individual joins a church somewhere, which to them is merely an aggregate of individual believers related to each other solely by virtue of their resolution to commit to Christ and that particular group. It follows, importantly, that relationships in this voluntarist structure are only important for the purpose of strengthening each member’s “relationship with the Lord.” To say it another way, going to church, for too many Christians, is something that is entirely unrelated to the act of becoming a Christian. That, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with my graduate school ecclesiology. Contractual voluntarism is an easy road to the church of the Holy Comforter.

Instead, church life must be seen as intrinsic to the Christian life. The Enlightenment told us that going to church and participating in organized religion was a social act, and in a way, that’s true. It’s also true that, as a social act, organized religion can be boring, hypocritical, repressive, injurious, and dull. In that respect, it’s just like any other social act by human beings. Intrinsic ecclesiology, however, insists that this particular social act, of Jews and Gentiles, male and female, rich and poor, all coming together around the common table of the risen Messiah, is the means by which the Holy Spirit is poured out over God’s creation. Good churchgoing doesn’t start with private individuals making authentic choices…it starts with the acknowledgement that whoever is there, and however they got there, that place has become is become the table of Jesus. Even though we may seem like the Elk’s club or the Spencerport bowling league, our gathering together is the visible and intrinsic movement of God on earth.

Secondly, a healthy ecclesiology must be eschatological at well as historical. What happened in the past is important. So are the things yet to come. I don’t mean by this that all of our church services ought to be about reading Revelation and fixating on the end times. Rather, the church must keep an eye on God’s ultimate future so as to model it in the present and in some ways to help build it up and bring it about. Now, there are enormous questions about what that future will look like, but the very act of raising those questions is a healthy start. What we ought not to do is live the life of the church wholly in reaction to the past, whether that be in reaction against it or in preservation of it.

Thirdly, the church must be materially situated in the present. Yes, the church exists somehow as a mystical manifestation of the body of Christ. Yes, within the life of the church we celebrate an ethereal and spiritual relation to the Christ. However, the church also exists in real people and in this real world, and it matters that we actually show up physically every week, because so much of our task requires it. Just by virtue of being the church, material work ought to be done, like feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, looking after those in need, and doing extraordinary art, music, and architecture to the glory and worship of God.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, I believe any useful ecclesiology must be improvisatory. Imagine for a moment that someone found the manuscript to a lost play by Shakespeare, but that the last part of the manuscript was not preserved. How would you go about setting and performing this play? You could read and perform the first four acts, but the last act would have to be improvised by the actors. How would you go about this sort of project? The material from the first four acts would have to be authoritative, of course. You’d carry over the same scenes and characters. You’d have to guess at the author’s intentions based on what had happened earlier in the play. Whatever you made up for the final act, if would have to have continuity with what came before, but it would be de facto partly your own creation. The church possesses the inspired word of God and two thousand years of spirit-led tradition, but we are the only ones who live and work and pray in the 21^st century. The terrifying and elating challenge of improvising our fifth act is to live in continuity with our scriptures and our traditions and to speak a relevant witness to our own living world. We may just write a masterpiece, and that’s worth getting out of bed for.