Introduction: the challenge
Question. What is the Church?
Answer. The family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit.1 Given the challenges we face in our time, that may sound rather hypothetical, and not very constructive. Many days, we are tempted to settle for less. So what is the vision of ‘Church’ implied by ‘Becoming the Story we Tell’?
At the heart of the Primate’s Proposal is an invitation to rediscover who and what we are in the celebration of the Paschal Mystery. For it is through the life, death and
resurrection of the Lord and the outpouring of the Spirit that God is bringing all creation to its fulfilment: “he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”2
And it is in baptism and eucharist that we are incorporated into this great work of God.
And so, at this moment of anxiety and confusion over the nature and calling of the Church, the Primate has invited us to recover that deeper understanding of baptism and eucharist which emerges when we celebrate them within the context of the Great Three Days, and within the larger context of Lent and Eastertide. We are invited to reconsider what it means to be ‘family of God, body of Christ, temple of the Holy Spirit’ in light of a sustained experience of communal formation over the ninety days of the Paschal Season. This invitation has its roots in the legacy of the ‘Great Church’ of the early centuries, which recognized the annual celebration of the Lord’s Passover as the preferred occasion for celebrating baptism. That preference gave rise to a season of purification and
illumination (Lent), followed by a season of formation in sacramental life (Eastertide): an integration of communal formation and sacramental initiation called ‘the
Catechumenate’. As the first Book of Common Prayer observed, “It appeareth by aãcient wryters, that the Sacramente of Baptisme in the olde tyme was not commonly ministred, but at two tymes in the yeare, at Easter and whytsontyde, at which tymes it was openly mynistred in the presence of all the congregacion.”3
Our own Book of Common Prayer further elucidates this
1
A SUPPLEMENTARY INSTRUCTION (THE CATECHISM), The Book of Common Prayer, Canada, 1959, p. 552.
2
Ephesians 1:9-10.
3
‘OF THE ADMINISTRACION OF PUBLYKE BAPTISME TO BE USED IN THE CHURCH,’ The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI, Everyman’s Library, no. 448 (London, Dent, 1910), p. 236.
vision, recalling that “In the primitive Church . . . the season of Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Baptism. It was also a time when persons . . . separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled and restored to the fellowship of the Church . . . Thereby the whole Congregation was put in mind . . . of the need which all Christians continually have of a renewal of their repentance and faith.”4
Undergirding this ancient development was a daring vision (supported by the emergence of a ‘Christian empire’) for bringing the whole world together under “the gentle and loving rule” of Christ.5
Sadly, in the centuries that followed, this rule (as implemented by the Church) often turned out to be anything but gentle and loving. Abuse of power may be the most- remembered feature of Christendom within our society today. Every aspect of the Church’s life — its sacraments, its doctrine, its exercise of ordained ministry, its liturgical architecture — was adapted to serve the interests of “thrones and dominions.”6
The
Catechumenate withered away, and initiation into the Christian faith became a matter of social conformity (and even coercion7
). Today there are few more urgent challenges for the Church than learning how to be a transparently repentant community.8
And yet, we cannot dismiss that vision of “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” The Primate’s Proposal invites us to reclaim that vision and participate in that mission, learning once again how to make disciples.
To participate in this mission, however, we need to take into account the vastly altered context of the Church, a context that has changed dramatically in our own lifetime. We cannot ‘do church’ the way we used to. Even the most basic elements of our tradition have become problematic. For example, within Christendom, when the whole
population (except for Jews and Muslims) was expected to be Christian, the word
4
The Book of Common Prayer, p. 673.
5
The Book of Alternative Services, 1985, p. 394.
6
Colossians 1:16.
7
Three examples may illustrate the extremes of this coercion:
(1) The Letter on the Conversion of the Jews by a 5th-century bishop named Severus tells of the forced conversion of Minorca’s 540 Jewish men and women in the year 418.
(Minorca, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minorca#Jews_of_Minorca.)
(2) After the conquest of Granada in 1492, it is estimated that over 50,000 Muslims were forcibly baptized. (After the Treaty of Granada, http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/beyond1492.html.)
(3) In the late 19th century, at the Angolan port of departure for enslaved African people, the main role of
the clergy was baptizing these people before they were loaded into the ships.
(Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Penguin, 2009), p. 710.)
8
The OT provides rich examples of penitence in the life of God’s people of old: Nehemiah 9; Psalm 106; Isaiah 63-64; Baruch 1-2.
‘church’ was typically used, not to refer to “the family of God, the body of Christ, the temple of the Spirit” (since that was presumably everybody), but to refer to the hierarchy. We live with that ambiguity still, to the impoverishment of our ecclesial consciousness — and our nostalgia for that lost world keeps the ambiguity alive. Clergy are still looked upon as the surrogate Christians, while ordinary Christians (at least within the historic denominations) do not think of themselves as ‘disciples.’ Social conformity no longer includes ‘going to church’; pluralism is the new reality of the social order; and religious conviction is considered a strictly personal affair, protected by a convention of tolerance. Biblical illiteracy is the norm even amongst the majority of those who practice their faith; Christian piety is largely a consumer activity on Sundays; the rest of the time we live as if there were no God.
Meanwhile, we have been captivated by new ‘thrones and dominions’ that behave as if they
were gods. We serve secular idols that posture as essential to human existence: carbon- based economic growth and an infallible marketplace, fame and fashion, progress and consumption, security in armaments.
So the challenges we face in participating in God’s mission in Christ are great. Yet, by becoming the story we tell, we can begin to glimpse once again God’s mysterious plan to bring all creation to its fulfilment through the death and rising of Christ and the
outpouring of the Spirit.
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The following resources are intended to assist us in naming this mystery and identifying the implications of the mystery for the way we ‘do church.’ We will need to revisit the shared experience of this Paschaltide project and reflect deeply on it, clearly pointing out the implied nature of church and sacraments.
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