When I speak about “church” I speak about all the faithful Christians in the world trapped in the mind-numbing semantics of their denominational pigsties AND those constellations of congregations who refuse to be part of anything bigger or play denominational politics or play nicely with others AND those free agents running around all by themselves unaffiliated and trying to find GOD in nature or drugs or other people. I’m talking the whole thing. But I’m not talking about individuals all by themselves. That’s the one thing I don’t mean. Because an essential part of being a Christian is being on this journey with other people.

This is what I think of when I think of “church.” I think of buildings and people and denominations and the church universal. I think of it all and we use the same word to describe it all. I hope that we can agree on a common definition: that it does mean all of these things, but it’s best understanding might be to describe the whole shebang.

If that’s the case, then what are we actually saying when we talk about the “church?”

 

As we think about how we enter our buildings specifically, we must also hold in tension that bigger entrance we are speaking to: that we are entering into something bigger than us: bigger than we are individually, locally, and even denominationally or nationally. We are entering into something so encompassing and powerful that we can’t comprehend how it could even work in the abstract.

That if we had created the church from whole cloth today, how could we? We couldn’t manufacture such diversity in thought and character on purpose and with anything close to the cohesion we actually do have. We couldn’t make the church ourselves if we tried.

That’s what I’m inviting us to enter into now; that we think about the local and the global impact of our physically entering into a local community as simultaneously entering into a global community. It is literal and metaphorical, if you need that distinction. That’s our start.

And the music starts and we are singing and we are getting ourselves on our way and going. We’ll do some readings and preaching and praying and all sorts of other stuff, but for now, we have only just arrived and gotten started and we are left wondering this:

How do I fit?

In this location and in this giant global thing. How do I fit in the church right now?

How is the church made? How do I know that I really am a part of this church? What does any of this have to do with me? Can I just sit here and not be a part of it?

I have ideas. You have ideas. And for many of us, these questions are only handled as personal choices. We say I think… or when we speak as a group we say My church says… or Scripture tells us… but rare is it that we speak with such whole authority that we actually are able to speak for the church. Someone will dissent. We struggle to find the we when all around us, we are taught to only care about the me.

Us and Them

In Mark’s gospel (we just read this last Sunday!) there is great scene in which the disciples are following Jesus to Jerusalem and he has predicted the passion and death that is going to befall him when he gets there. And the disciples are silent on the issue because they honestly haven’t been paying attention to what Jesus has been saying. They’re arguing over who gets to be the best.

I could probably say: sounds like the church! But that isn’t my whole point here.

Right after this, the disciples see this dude running around healing people in the name of Jesus. He isn’t one of them. Chances are he’s some guy that was healed somewhere along the line or fed in the crowds and was told to tell nobody and then proceeds to tell everybody. One of those. But here he is, doing some amazing things for Jesus. But he isn’t “official”. He isn’t one of them. So the disciples tell the guy to cut it out. And Jesus totally facepalms. Ugh! Seriously, GOD, do you see what I have to work with?

Alright, what he actually says is

‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.

Mark 9:39-40

This is a huge line and totally alien to our way of thinking: “Whoever is not against us is for us.” This is not at all the same as saying “Whoever is not for us is against us.” That is enemy-making. That is narrowing the definition of who is in the “in” group to only those who toe this particular line: my way or the highway.

What Jesus actually seems to be articulating is that the only enemies are the people who are actively opposed to us. Everybody else counts as being “in”.

Ask Yourself

What if this great big, scary, overly legalistic and prone to infighting (and out-fighting) Church of ours is built, not on the backs of our individualism and our separations and our agreements and even our creeds, but to this more amazing and powerful hope: that church is all of us. That the insiders are the people who don’t choose to be the outsiders. That this amazingly diverse and calamitously unfocused thing we call the church is, in all of its messiness, the actual embodiment of Jesus’s sense of unity. What if this is what Jesus is talking about?

And what if, in light of this fact, our work is to make this reality even more real? What would we do? How might our congregations and buildings and ministries and denominations change to meet this more real reality? Who would we become?

And what does this new reality mean for you?

[This is Day 3 of How to start deconstructing church. The next in the series is “Lessons”. To start from the beginning, read the introduction here.]