Toward the Church as Sacred Community
Paul Hooker - 3 June 2010
I have just read a piece I think you may find interesting. “Visions of the Sacred Community” is an adaptation from a current book by four Jewish authors that studied eight congregations who are transforming themselves from functional to visionary (the author’s terms). The book is Sacred Stories: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary, by Aron, Cohen, Hoffman, and Kelman (Alban Institute, 2010). Aron et al. lay out six characteristics of the shift from functional to visionary congregations that echo what Stan Ott has done in his Twelve Dynamic Shifts for Transforming Your Church. The article is on the Alban Institute’s website; go to http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=9079 and check it out.
The driving principle behind this transformation is actually an older insight by sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who argues that people who are active participants in religious communities have shifted from being “dwellers” – people content to join existing religious structures and perpetuate what has been built for them by others – to “seekers” – people who participate in congregational life because they derive from it a sense of genuine personal meaning.
One paragraph in the article struck me as worthy of particular note:
No congregation performs perfectly as a visionary congregation in all aspects. Rather, we envision the six characteristics shared by visionary congregations as continual, in which the core distinction of a congregation is that it is always in pursuit of sacredness over consumerism, holism over segmentation, participation over passivity, innovation over routine, meaning over rote interactions, and reflection over inattention.
It seems to me that the word continual – meaning functioning on a continuum – is both vital and liberating. It reminds us that transformation is a process, a journey, and that a community is found at various times in various places along the pathway of that journey. There is not better or worse, success or failure, right or wrong, but growth and development and – above all else – learning.
I find myself wanting to think theologically about what it means to be a “sacred community.” What does the “pursuit of sacredness” entail?
The first thing to say is that, if the church is a sacred community, it is so not because of what it does when it gathers for worship or study or prayer. Our sacredness is not inherent in us or in anything we do. Rather, we are sacred – “holy” – because Christ is holy, and by the power of the Spirit Christ calls the church into being and imbues it with his holiness. To “pursue the sacred” is to follow Christ, regardless of where Christ leads us. Put another way, the church lives out its Christ-endowed identity as a sacred commuity as it witnesses to and participates in Christ’s mission of transformation of lives., societies, and creation itself.
I’m convinced that the church’s recovery of itself as a sacred community is directly related to the willingness of its leadership to take with renewed seriousness their calling to teach the faith and equip the saints for ministry. The kind of teaching I’m talking about isn’t doctrinaire but dialogical; it begins with people where they are and invites them to reflect on their experience in light of the gospel. It isn’t confined to Sunday School classroom; it takes place in session meetings and hospital rooms, casual conversations over coffee in the kitchen, service projects in the community and meetings of the city council … and yes, in the pulpit and from the font and table, and in the pews. It’s not just the job of the pastor; it is the calling of every leader in the church. But it is guided and nurtured by pastoral reflection, or it quickly goes astray. This kind of teaching erases the distinction between “Christian education” and “Christian life”; indeed, it transforms the one into the other. It invites each of us to understand the narrative of our individual lives as part of the great meta-narrative of God’s engagement with the world, and to find meaning in participating in that engagement.
My sense is that it means that congregations are called to be communities committed to a common vision of God, revealed in Christ by the power of the Spirit. Such a commitment requires us delicately to navigate between the Scylla of doctrinal rigidity on the one hand and the Charybdis of “anything goes” antinomianism on the other.
My guess, though, is that the greater danger for the post-modern church is not lapsing into fundamentalism – in truth, the culture as a whole resists this sort of authoritarianism – but blessing the culture’s narcissistic individualism in which the only experience that matters is my experience and the only truth to which I am subject is my truth. This is what Robert Bellah famously called, “sheilaism,” after a young nurse he quoted in Habits of the Heart:
Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as "Sheilaism." This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. "I believe in God," Sheila says. "I am not a religious fanatic. [Notice at once that in our culture any strong statement of belief seems to imply fanaticism so you have to offset that.] I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice." Sheila's faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining what she calls "my own Sheilaism," she said: "It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other." Like many others, Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific points.
In a lecture subsequent to the publication of Habits of the Heart, Bellah went on to suggest that “Sheilaism” points up a
radical tension between a conception of the church as a part of the common life, as there before we came, as it will be after we go, as partly constituting who we are – and not merely a flimsy, temporary structure that depends on our momentary and voluntary will for its existence at all. But the question remains, how do we, in a pluralist society, avoid the radical individualism expressed by Sheila …?
In an effort to answer that question, Bellah relies on the church’s tradition:
The point here is as communities, as churches with a strong sense of corporate identity, we enter into the public sphere and speak to our fellow citizens out of our faith, not in some triumphalist claim for special privilege, but also without renouncing the fact that we carry a tradition that is deep and that forms our lives.
Our own theological tradition would suggest that the pursuit of sacredness is first a function of the Spirit, which binds us to Christ and to one another, and not our own initiative. Second, perhaps, it would remind us that the result of the Spirit’s work is the process of sanctification – growth in God’s grace – rather than the achievement of a final status of perfection or blessedness. Third, the function of the church as a “community of the sacred” is to provide the opportunity to grow in the “ordinary means of grace” –proclamation of the Word, participation in the sacraments, and a life of prayer (see, among other places, The Westminster Larger Catechism, Q.154; The Book of Confessions, 7.264).
I think it’s worth noting that, if we understand the pursuit of sacredness in this way, it is not a matter of knowledge but of practice. Knowing the right doctrine, while valuable, is only part of the picture. There is something transformative about doing that builds upon our knowing. We appropriate the gift of sacredness as we participate in the church’s work of witness through proclamation, sacramental life, and discipleship.
Paul
