Christ and Community

I’m sure you’ve heard people saying they believe in God or even Christ, but don’t have any use for Church or “organized religion. Recently, I even heard well-known talk show host Neil Boortz say that he considered himself a Christian, but didn’t belong to a Church because most Christians are hypocrites who only go to church to be seen so that others will think they’re religious people (which tells us a lot about why Boortz would go to Church, if he did, I think). Other reasons have to do with the belief that organized religion imposes lots of arbitrary rules and regulations which only stifle spirituality and faith in Christ. While this is certainly true in some cases, it misses a few basic points, which we shall get to shortly. There are other justifications given, one of the most common being some kind of wrong done by a pastor to the person or his/her family. The list goes on and on. Maybe you have a few of your own.

I don’t have the answer to all these questions and objections, of course, but I do find it helpful from time to time to try to get in touch with what Jesus’ own intent was regarding the Church. Did he intend there to be a Church, even “organized religion?” Reflection on this topic is especially important to me during those “low times” in Church involvement. After all, as we noted in conferences 1 and 2, you can develop a personal relationship with Christ through your prayer and devotion. During the down times, it’s tempting to want to just pursue the other modes of union with Christ and let the Church go on without me. But one of the things that stops me from doing so is my understanding of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, and what this means in terms of growing in Christ.

To get in touch with some of the primary roots of our theological understanding of the relationship between Christ and the Church, we recall the conversion of Paul the Apostle as described in Acts 9. You know the story, I’m sure, but I’ll recap briefly. Paul (then Saul) had been commissioned by the Jewish religious authorities to “clean up the synagogues,” expelling Christians from them and even arresting them, if necessary. While traveling to Damascus (site of a very active community), he was knocked down by a bright light from heaven. A voice spoke to him, saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, and you are persecuting me,” was the reply.

You know the rest of the story. Saul went on to Damascus and presented himself to the Christian community, where an elder healed him from the blindness that had befallen him with the vision. He tried for awhile to make himself useful to the Church, but the response seemed to be, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” They took their sweet time about it, too, virtually ignoring him for about 12 years, after which he was called upon to lead missions to Gentile regions.

What did Paul do during those 12 years when he had no authorized ministry?

My guess is that he reflected and prayed and came to the theological convictions and depth of relationship with Christ that we find evidenced in his writings. Surely he was also a member of a Christian community and maybe even a leader, only locally, however. I’m sure he must have thought a great deal about Jesus’ question, “Why do you persecute me?” He must have wondered about how Jesus identified himself with the community of believers so intimately that to harass them was to harass Jesus.

Out of this experience, Paul came to understand what he later expressed in 1 Cor. 12 and other places as his theology of the Mystical Body. If persecuting the Church is persecuting Jesus, then the Church must be a kind of presence of Jesus. Paul understood this to mean that Jesus was continuing his work in human history through the ministry of the Church. Where there was once this single individual named Jesus of Nazareth going about doing good in the land of Israel, now there were these thousands of individuals acting as a kind of social organism, empowered by the same Spirit who had moved through Jesus. These people of faith and their communities were like a body--a Mystical Body, living by the Spirit of Christ, carrying out the mission to be reconciled with God that Christ had manifest.

Paul’s theology of the Holy Spirit is related to this understanding of the Mystical Body. The Spirit is given as the Life of the Body; individuals in the Body come to live by the life of the Spirit and are blessed by the Spirit with gifts, or charisms, which are given to build up the Life of the Body. Some are blessed with gifts of healing, some with teaching, and there are lots of other gifts mentioned in Scripture--prophecy, administration, working miracles, tongues, interpreting tongues--and no doubt many gifts not mentioned in Scripture. Individuals in the body have a role to play in building up the Body, but none can say they are more important than others. If the Spirit gives a certain gift to one person but not to another, that is the Spirit’s business, and nothing the individual can take much credit or blame for. To be a member of the Body is blessing enough; to do one’s part in building up the Body is all that is expected.

Some of the implications of this perspective are very important. First and foremost is the emphasis on the fact that Jesus identifies his work on earth now with the work of the Christian community. This is not to deny that he is also working outside the Church, but it is to recognize that he most definitely intended to continue his work through the Church. To pursue a relationship with Jesus to the exclusion of the Church would seem, then, to be in contradiction to how Jesus himself wanted to continue his work. If one has been blessed with a faith relationship in Christ, then one is a kind of cell in His Mystical Body, and just as a cell in our body has life when it is connected to the body, so it is the same with us individual cells in the Body of Christ. Apart from the Body, we cut ourselves off from the flow of Spirit moving through the Body and animating its parts. We might be able to hang in there with our faith, but we won’t know the depth of Life that Christ intends for us to know. He wants us to know this Life as members of a Christian community. That’s all part of his plan for us.

Another implication is that as individual cells, we exist *for* the Body, and not for ourselves. The old self has died and the new one lives by the Life of the Body, which is the Spirit. We are given the grace of faith for our individual salvation and spiritual enrichment, that is true. But almost more importantly, we are given faith for the salvation and enrichment of others. Every part of the Body is needed; to withhold ourselves from the Body is to deprive other Christians of the gifts we have been blessed with to minister to them.

This last point is especially important, I think. As noted above, the Spirit blesses us with gifts for the sake of the Body. Everyone who has been baptized and who has faith has received Spiritual seeds of these gifts, or charisms. It is not a question, then, of if you have been gifted, but of learning what your gifts are, and of finding ways to use them. What you discover when you do so is that the exercising of your gift opens you to the flow of the Spirit, who blesses others through your gifts. Blessings given and received, a marvelous dynamic of grace! But apart from the Christian community, we do not come to awareness of our gifts--or not very deeply, I’m convinced--and we don’t experience the blessings that come when we share our gifts.

What I’ve been sharing here is at the level of teaching, rather than a personal sharing as was the previous conference. You can imagine the experiential implications, however, and I will share some from my own life. One is that I have observed many times a relationship between the exercising of my charisms and my involvement in community. I have also come to greater awareness of my charisms because of community. When I am active in Christian community, it seems as though these charisms are more easily activated than when I’m not. I wonder if you’ve noticed the same in your own life?

Another observation is the blessing that comes from exercising a charism. As you have probably guessed, one of my charisms is spiritual writing, which is form of teaching and encouraging, but in a very specific modality. When I am writing letters to family members about what’s going on in my life, it has a very different feel and energy than when I write a piece like this, which is for the building up of part of the Body of Christ. It might feel the same when I get started . . . sometimes just staring at my computer screen and wondering what to say. Even if I have an outline for a piece of spiritual writing, it can be slow getting started. But once I make a movement to write, the teaching often seems to come of its own. The words almost seems to be “given” to me intuitively--like they just come into my mind without me thinking them. I do not say that what I write should therefore be received uncritically, only that the experience of working with the grace of a charism is different from squeezing words out of my own inner resources. When writing or teaching out of a charism, I hardly feel depleted. In fact, I often feel more energy, and a closeness to God that wasn’t there before.

Discovering our charisms helps us to come to understand something of our role in Christian community; implied in the Spirit’s giving a charism is something of a call to use it for the good of the Body. I will go into this in more depth during the series I present in June (“Come Holy Spirit”). The point I’m making here is that this dimension of Christian identity and mission just isn’t realized very deeply when we hold ourselves apart from the Body of believers. The preacher might be boring, the community might be kind of dead--all the more reason the Spirit nudges us to exercise our charisms. This Spirit wants the Body of Christ to be fully alive, as Jesus himself was on earth and is even now in his glorified Body. And the Spirit wants to use you and me to invigorate the Body. Now that’s what I call a plan of action!

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What thoughts/feelings do you have from reading this conference?

2. How do you feel about "organized religion?"

3. What difference does Christian community make in your own life? If this is a struggle at this time, please feel free to share why this is so.