Community
Some ideas about the church that I pulled from a website for the Ekklesia project.
"Many Christians today think of the Church as the place where we gather with other like-minded people to enjoy their company and to get our “spiritual needs met.” This definition is expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, but the problem with it is the supposition that the Church is constituted as a collection of discrete individuals who exist prior to the social body . . . What is considered of primary importance in this distorted view is one’s own desires (or tastes) and/or one’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The Church becomes simply the host site for an aggregate of individuals who wish to share and express a faith."
"We need to recover (or establish) a sense of the Church itself as a gift—not an institution to be managed by smart people, not a territory to be protected, not a possession to be guarded, but the divine gift of life in Christ which is offered for our sakes and for the sake of the world. When we can move to this more mature place of seeing the Church as gift, then we will stop reverting always “to what makes us anxious rather than [to] that which makes us grateful.”
"The Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organize it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or landscape. It is a place where we can see properly—God, God’s creation, ourselves. It is a place or dimension in the universe that is in some way growing towards being the universe itself in restored relation to God. It is a place we are invited to enter, the place occupied by Christ, who is himself the climate and atmosphere of a renewed universe."
"The central questions of ecclesiology, in our time as in all others, remain stark and straightforward: to whom or what do we belong? To what body do we pledge our allegiance? What commitments do we recognize as those to which all others must bend or bow?"
"Too many churches have turned the clear and unambiguous call of Jesus and the Holy Spirit into a confused and contradictory mix of caution and self-interest."
"Increasing numbers of people are becoming aware of the limits of the so-called Constantinian bargain that compromises the Gospel in order to cultivate good relations with secular institutions of political, economic, and social power."
"The Church as the Body of Christ–the material, living community that crosses all borders and human divisions–has been too easily and often compromised and fragmented by unwise accommodations with states, ethnic and racial imperatives, and the naturalized imperatives of class, gender, and ideology. "
What I like about that is its statement that we have compromised the commitment to the gospel in our bowing down to secular, economic, and political institutions. We have made friends with the world. It is a question of loyalty, of to whom and to what do we bow, to what do we show undivided loyalty. The Church becomes a thing in which we look for our needs to be met, but not in the way of stepping into the incredible reality of the real life of Christ - inhabiting that "space" in the words of the author. What people have often lamented when they say, "My group is a social club."
"Many Christians today think of the Church as the place where we gather with other like-minded people to enjoy their company and to get our “spiritual needs met.” This definition is expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, but the problem with it is the supposition that the Church is constituted as a collection of discrete individuals who exist prior to the social body . . . What is considered of primary importance in this distorted view is one’s own desires (or tastes) and/or one’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The Church becomes simply the host site for an aggregate of individuals who wish to share and express a faith."
"We need to recover (or establish) a sense of the Church itself as a gift—not an institution to be managed by smart people, not a territory to be protected, not a possession to be guarded, but the divine gift of life in Christ which is offered for our sakes and for the sake of the world. When we can move to this more mature place of seeing the Church as gift, then we will stop reverting always “to what makes us anxious rather than [to] that which makes us grateful.”
"The Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organize it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or landscape. It is a place where we can see properly—God, God’s creation, ourselves. It is a place or dimension in the universe that is in some way growing towards being the universe itself in restored relation to God. It is a place we are invited to enter, the place occupied by Christ, who is himself the climate and atmosphere of a renewed universe."
"The central questions of ecclesiology, in our time as in all others, remain stark and straightforward: to whom or what do we belong? To what body do we pledge our allegiance? What commitments do we recognize as those to which all others must bend or bow?"
"Too many churches have turned the clear and unambiguous call of Jesus and the Holy Spirit into a confused and contradictory mix of caution and self-interest."
"Increasing numbers of people are becoming aware of the limits of the so-called Constantinian bargain that compromises the Gospel in order to cultivate good relations with secular institutions of political, economic, and social power."
"The Church as the Body of Christ–the material, living community that crosses all borders and human divisions–has been too easily and often compromised and fragmented by unwise accommodations with states, ethnic and racial imperatives, and the naturalized imperatives of class, gender, and ideology. "
What I like about that is its statement that we have compromised the commitment to the gospel in our bowing down to secular, economic, and political institutions. We have made friends with the world. It is a question of loyalty, of to whom and to what do we bow, to what do we show undivided loyalty. The Church becomes a thing in which we look for our needs to be met, but not in the way of stepping into the incredible reality of the real life of Christ - inhabiting that "space" in the words of the author. What people have often lamented when they say, "My group is a social club."
posted by David at 3:11 PM
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