A Vision of Church

My favorite workday is Thursday, the day when I am usually the only one in the office for a chunk of time. The day when I can listen to whatever I want without worrying about bothering those around me. The day I usually listen to God Complex Radio. But last week, there was no new episode of GCR, so instead I listened to a Dr. Sam Wells sermon.

Dr. Wells is the Dean of Duke Chapel. As many of you know, I went to Duke as an undergrad. Those were the Will Willimon days. But a few years ago, I got to tag along when my boss interviewed Dr. Wells for his TV show. Dr. Wells had just been installed as the new Dean, and since that day I have periodically read manuscripts of Dr. Wells’s sermons. Only recently, though, have I started listening to them. Even better! After all, he’s got a British accent!

Yesterday I listened to his Pentecost sermon. Pentecost was a few weeks ago, but I missed the service at my own church because it was my day for nursery duty. I think I picked the Pentecost sermon because I was looking for something hopeful. Something exciting and new. I’ve been feeling a little down lately; in a bad funk, frankly. We’ve passed the one-year mark in our new home, and I’ve been questioning my place in this community. But Pentecost, that original Pentecost, was an amazing day of new beginnings and a new kind of community. Seemed like a good place for me to start.

In his sermon, Dr. Wells speaks of the church as “One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic” (from the Nicene Creed). That’s the ideal church, anyway. We all know it doesn’t live up to the ideal. It has it’s all-too-brief moments of oneness, holiness, diversity and mission. But rarely all at once. And all too often the Church seems to be just the opposite of those noble attributes. And yet, it has a hold on me.

Here is where the sermon really grabbed me: Dr. Wells quotes from Rose Macaulay’s semi-autobiographical novel The Towers of Trebizond. I’ve never read this novel, but it apparently traces the story of Laurie, who is traveling in the Middle East and struggling with her vision of the church. And in the novel Laurie has a dream in which the city of Trebizond is transformed into the kingdom of God, and she says:

At the secret heart of the city and the legend and the glory in which I was caught and held, there was some pattern that I could not unravel, some hard core that I could not make my own, and, seeing the pattern and the hard core enshrined within the walls, I turned back from the city and stood outside it, expelled in mortal grief. (200-201)

Since hearing those words, I’ve been entranced by that picture: “…the glory in which I was caught and held, there was some pattern that I could not unravel…[and I] stood outside it….”

Because though I am a member of one church and work for another, though I have an M.Div. degree and sometimes dream about working as a minister again someday, though I read a lot about Church (big C) and church (little c) in blogs and books and articles, I often feel like I’m standing on the outside looking in. Like there’s some puzzle I can’t quite figure out. Wondering, sometimes, why this beautiful dream church continues to speak to me when I often feel so disconnected from the actual church. Wondering why I continue to hope for the ideal, for the church which ushers in the kingdom of God, when I’m more likely to be dismayed by pettiness, apathy, silliness, insularity, even hurtfulness.

Hopeful and dismayed. That seems to sum up my relationship with the church. I know some people have a much more positive relationship with the church. Of you, I’m a bit jealous. And I know others have a much more negative relationship with the church. To you, I’m so sorry for the hurt we have caused.

I still say “we” in the previous sentence. Even though there are days, weeks (months?) when I would like to quit the church, it holds me still, even on the edges. Why is this? Is it only because my husband is a minister and it would be rather embarrassing for him if I quit? Is it because I spent so much time and money on getting a degree that is supposed to be used in a church? Is it because I’ve spent so much of my life in church that I just can’t fathom a break from it?

Yes, partly, I suspect all those things are true. Partly, but not wholly.

For, in the words of Laurie again:

[The church] grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something….(195-96)

And so I stay in this broken church because I, too, grasp something. Something of the brightness of a “one, holy, catholic, apostolic” community. Something of the beauty that God intended, marred though it is by human frailty. When I am overwhelmed by the failure of myself and of this community, I still grasp for it. Sometimes I grasp with only a weak, half-hearted reach, and sometimes with a clawing, determined lunge. I may not always know why this bright vision of church has a hold on me, but for now, I can’t let it go. For now, bright hope wins over dark dismay. Because when the church gets it right, it truly is bright.

Letting Laurie have the last word: “It is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it.”