Unpacking A Definition of Church

 

A while back I offered a definition of Church and then promised to unpack some of the terms I used. Here is that promised post.

The Church is a body of diverse and fallible people who are stewards of God’s grace.

That grace is found most completely in the person of Jesus Christ, who is our crucified Lord, revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.

Our acts of stewardship consist of proclaiming the good news of Jesus as both crucified and Lord in word and deed, and worshipping together in ways that allow us to continue to trust in Jesus.

 

Diverse—American Lutheranism has never been a monolith. The ELCA is a merging of multiple streams of Lutheran people from a variety of places and cultural milieus. For that matter, ELCA congregations are located in a wide variety of contexts, each with their own complexities in how ministry happens. As such local contexts matter, and how ministry is done will vary greatly from place to place.

Fallible—We are a church of both saints and sinners, and as such there needs to be gentleness and understanding for those who fall short, mechanisms in place for mutual accountability, and strong rules in place to counter abuse when it occurs at any level in this church. There ought to be ways for relationships to be restored that aren’t overly convoluted or painful (it ought to be noted Matthew 18 is in the ELCA’s current constitution). At the same time, there do need to be ways to hold people to account. Functionally, our three-fold expression of Church model can leave gaps in accountability, which seem to be there for litigious reasons.

Stewards—It ought to be foremost on our minds that the church exists only because the Holy Spirit wills us to exist. As such we are always caretakers, never sovereigns. This attitude will hopefully ensure we never allow God’s work to be hijacked by national mood or political ideology. It is God’s mission, given to us by grace. There is always a temptation to identify the Faith with whatever system or ideology is “winning” in the culture at the moment. This is the “City of God” problem, what happens when Rome falls? What happens when the Cold War ends? What happens when the Counterculture goes mainstream? What happens when the “Christian Nation” candidate loses? If the Church has remembered who our Sovereign is, none of these things will threaten us existentially.

God—Who is revealed in the canonical scriptures, affirmed in the historical creeds, reaffirmed in the Augsburg Confessions and the Book of Concord, and continually at work among us, beyond us, and ahead of us.

Jesus—Human and divine, whose ministry is witnessed to in the 4 canonical Gospels, who transformed the life trajectory of Paul of Tarsus, and whose resurrected life continues to shake people up in analogous ways to this very day.

Crucified—The way of Jesus is the way of the Cross. He relativizes all understanding of authority—he is the King who refuses the crown, the religious authority who is rejected for being inclusive. All power talk must be interpreted in light of what the powers, religious and secular, did to Jesus Christ. His one command was love, his last action before his death was washing feet. We must always look for God in the last place we would think to look, and recognize that God is concerned first and foremost for the least, last, and lost.

Lord—The type of authority Jesus practices relativizes all other ways of wielding power and exercising leadership. His Lordship is directly connected to the Kingdom of God—that is the experience of God reigning in the world as described in Jesus’ various parables on the subject. When wrongs are righted, when the small are mighty, when forgiveness and mercy are obviously paramount. We as a Church endeavor to lead like Jesus and bring about the Reign of God here on earth, even as we await its coming as we pray.

Holy Spirit—The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, “the silent sovereign” has been with the Church since Pentecost, always going ahead of the Church, always rousing us to be Christ’s body in the world whenever we would be more comfortable just being some people gathered together on occasion. In our baptisms we receive the Holy Spirit, who is most fully active in our life when we participate in moments of the Church catching up to what God is already doing in the world.

Good News—The good news is that Jesus is Crucified Lord and all that implies for the world. His life, death, and resurrection having an ongoing impact upon all that exists.

Word—The joint proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the Good News. This is most clearly done in the Lutheran Church via reading and interpreting the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament. This interpretation ought to be done in a way that involves “Law and Gospel,” that is, using the scriptures to test the justness of our present world and our own actions and intentions, and then also hearing it as a freeing word for us today. This is also done through study of scripture both individually and in community. Getting a handle on what the scripture meant in it’s historical and cultural context allows us to imagine more clearly what God is saying to our historical moment and culture, without this scholarly and creative interpretive movement the Word can be badly misused.

Deed—There are many and various ways to serve our neighbors in need. All of them should be done in ways that point to Jesus’ unique authority and to the reality of those Kingdom Parables. Two examples that have bore fruit are: Feeding ministries of various sorts—in fact some Synods require every congregation to participate in a ministry that feeds people, healing ministries—be it sponsoring a hospital or hosting a parish nurse. These both are in continuity with Jesus’ ministries.

Worship—As witnessed in both Luke’s Gospel and the Didache, Christians traditionally worship in a way that contains four movements: gathering together as a community, reading scriptures, sharing a thanksgiving meal, and being sent out into the world as the re-formed body of Christ. There are well thought out documents that outline best practices from both Lutheran perspectives (The Use of the Means of Grace) as well as an ecumenical ones (Baptism Eucharist Ministry). Worship is faithful when it strengthens our trust in the God we meet in Jesus.

Trust—The Christian response to God’s free gift to us is often described in Protestant tradition as “Faith” or “Belief”. Often times Faith gets at a numinous and emotive aspect of this response to God’s grace, and Belief gets to a dogmatic and cognitive aspect. Trust is another way of talking about this response, that perhaps bridges the gap between those two descriptors. It also uplifts the mutuality and relational aspect of Grace’s effect on Christians—we trust Jesus because Jesus is trustworthy.