Being Church…

The two main sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, are the spiritual pillars of the Church. They are not simply instruments by which the Church exercises its ministry. They are not just means by which we become and remain members of the Church but belong to the essence of the Church. Without these sacraments there is no Church. The Church is the body of Christ fashioned by baptism and the Eucharist. When people are baptised in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and when they gather around the table of Christ and receive his Body and Blood, they become the people of God, called the Church…

The Church is the people of God. The Latin word for "church," ecclesia, comes from the Greek ek, which means "out," and kaleo, which means "to call." The Church is the people of God called out of slavery to freedom, sin to salvation, despair to hope, darkness to light, an existence centered on death to an existence focused on life.

When we think of Church we have to think of a body of people, travelling together. We have to envision women, men, and children of all ages, races, and societies supporting one another on their long and often tiresome journeys to their final home…

The Church is holy and sinful, spotless and tainted. The Church is the bride of Christ, who washed her in cleansing water and took her to himself "with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless" (Ephesians 5:26-27). The Church too is a group of sinful, confused, anguished people constantly tempted by the powers of lust and greed and always entangled in rivalry and competition.

When we say that the Church is a body, we refer not only to the holy and faultless body made Christ-like through baptism and Eucharist but also to the broken bodies of all the people who are its members. Only when we keep both these ways of thinking and speaking together can we live in the Church as true followers of Jesus…

The Church is an object of faith. In the Apostles' Creed we pray: "I believe in God, the Father, ... in Jesus Christ, his only Son in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." We must believe in the Church! The Apostles' Creed does not say that the Church is an organization that helps us to believe in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No, we are called to believe in the Church with the same faith we believe in God.

Often it seems harder to believe in the Church than to believe in God. But whenever we separate our belief in God from our belief in the Church, we become unbelievers. God has given us the Church as the place where God becomes God-with-us.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I am deeply concerned for people who live as Christians outside any church. I know that in so many cases they are women and men who have been deeply hurt, mistreated, abused, within church communities, and cannot now trust themselves to church as family, just as sometimes victims of sexual and other kinds of abuse by relatives cannot trust themselves to stable relationships. But not all "out of church Christians" are in this situation.

Of course there are those too who simply believe they are better off out of it - "I don't need to go to church to be a Christian!" - and many of them have deeply thoughtful and principled reasons for their position.

I am by no means making a case here for the established churches - Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian or whatever - over against less formal groups of Christians, from Warehouse Church to home church. What I am saying is that, as Nouwen points out above, being a Christian is necessarily being church. "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12.12-13) If we are isolated from the rest of the body, we may be like a toe that has been cut off, and left on the side of the road. Our position may not be not encouraging. We may simply shrivel and die; but we mustn't forget that there are crows… and that worries me.

I shall have to go on thinking, and above all praying, about this…