Welcome to #ATLT, At the Lord's Table: A Conversation, a series of over 50 posts from varying authors about the beautiful, mangled Church. Look for at least two new posts every Monday through Saturday between January 25th and February 22nd. Join us in the conversation? See you in the comments.
I've been sitting here, staring at this empty page, for twenty minutes.
My mind is as blank as the screen of my computer.
This question haunts me: Why do I love the Church?
It had seemed at first to be just the kind of thing I would love to write on. Thinking and writing about the church is my profession, after all. But I've grown a little too comfortable thinking and writing in the impersonal abstractions of academic theorizing. I could sit here and write an extended discourse on the meaning or the importance of the church. But this question, this terribly intimate and personal question, leaves me mute, completely devoid of answers. Why do I love the church?
I suppose this question is so hard for me to answer because if I am honest with myself, I love the church as an idea. But I don't love the church itself. I don't even like the church in the concreteness of my weekly Sunday morning reality. It’s quite easy for me to love the idea of the church. It is another thing all together to love the actual church - the church that ignores, that is petty and neglectful and narrow-minded. It is so easy to love an abstraction of the church but so hard to love the real church, the church in which I find myself in each week.
After all, the church can sometimes be a source of incredible pain - rejection, neglect, misunderstanding. I for one have been a part of churches that have inflicted wounds so deep that I carry them still.
So why go to church each week? Why dedicate so much time and energy to something I don't particularly like and I most certainly do not love? After all, attending a church is not like a marriage - you have not made a public commitment “for better or worse” with the church. Nothing says I have to stick with this particular church if it is hurtful or annoying. In our consumeristic culture, it is quite acceptable to abandon something - even a church - when it doesn't satisfy my desires any longer. Think of the way we so casually throw around the phrase "church shopping"! What is the point of shopping other than to find something I like? If I don't like my church, I could very easily abandon the church and stick to loving the others in my life that I actually do like and have chosen for myself: my spouse, my friends.
It is easy to love my sweetheart, even amidst her frustrating or hurtful habits because there is a preexisting foundation of delight, desire, and appreciation that draws me to her, despite the difficulties. It is easy to love my friends because, after all, I chose them. They are people of my sort.
The Church though is very often a collection of people most decidedly not of my sort. Often they are too loud, or too quiet, or too dull, or too neurotic, or too superficial, or too needy, or tone deaf, or overly argumentative. It's comparatively easy to love those we chose as friends or lovers because there are things about them that draw us to them quite naturally, things about them that we like and appreciate. I for one cannot say the same thing about a lot of the people in the churches of which I’ve been a part. Sure, loving your friends, your lover, and your family is a challenge and it can be terribly trying. But there is a deep bond present in those loves that may be utterly lacking when it comes to the church - this voluntarily joined community of "broken, hobbled, crippled, sexually abused and spiritual abused, emotionally unstable, passive and passive-aggressive, neurotic men and women."[1]
If my church congregation isn't easy, it isn't pleasant, it isn't enjoyable, and it isn't likable, nothing says I have to be there, enduring the frustrations and wounds of this congregation.
But here is what I've realized: I don't go to Church because I like it. I go because I need the Church. I need the Church because without it my love remains superficial; it remains merely natural, limited to the loves of affection, friendship, and eros. And these loves, my love for my sweetheart, for my friends, because they are natural, are comparatively easy loves.[2]
But if I limit myself to loving those I want to love, to those that I like, to those to whom I am naturally drawn, then my love remains immature. Don’t get me wrong. It is right and good to love those I like, to develop and cultivate our natural loves. But if I love only those I like I remain limited, immature - mine is an infantile love, still suckling milk of natural love, unable to handle the solid food of the divine, sacrificial love of struggle, forgiveness, and grace. To love the poor in character, the emotionally beggarly, the manipulative, the neurotic, the judgmental - especially when I don't have to, when I could very easily walk away and find a new church, a “better” church - my love is forced to expand, to grow, to mature. The brokenness and hurtfulness of the church challenges my love to mature toward divine agape in a way that loving those I like simply does not.
I need the Church because it teaches me what true, godly love is. It teaches me this, not primarily through the proclamation of the Word or through the symbol of broken bread and poured out wine (well, grape juice) but simply by being the screwed up, hurtful, neurotic, annoying place that it is. A place where I am challenged to love like Christ loves - to love this church, not the idea of the church in abstraction from the broken reality I experience each week. After all, the sufferings of Christ’s love for his Bride were not for an abstraction. They were for this group of people I’m surrounded by each Sunday morning. The church becomes the place where I am invited, quite literally, to participate in the very love of Christ for his bride - a love that is freely given, humble, sacrificial (even mortifying), grace-granting and life-giving.
We may not like the church. We may not love the church. But we need the church. It is through the Church that we come to know what love truly is: a Christic and kenotic love that pours itself out for others even unto death (Philippians 2: 5-11). A love that lead to a stake outside the holy city, a love revealed in the blood and water issuing from the wounded side, a love that tastes the fullness of the mortification of the self and its selfish will, a love that plunges into the fullness of death. A love that bids us to participate, to share, to "follow me." Perhaps the brokenness of the church, complete with all of its petty annoyances and grievous hurts, rather than being a problem we need to fix, is an invitation. An invitation to grow, to be transformed, to be conformed to the likeness of Christ so that we might ourselves be made like him - to be more truly his body, broken and given out to the world in love.
[1] Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 27.
[2] I'm not at all suggesting that loving a friend or a spouse is "easy" as in it requires little effort. They are “easy” because they come to us naturally. We fall into friendship, affection, and erotic love without much effort. My point is that when compared to loving the church, loving even an irritating friend or spouse is a comparatively easy endeavor because there's a certain innate and natural delight in those relationships that may be lacking in the relation with the church.
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read the post before this one, here.
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Matthew Moser
Matt Moser is currently completing his PhD in theology at Baylor University where he also teaches courses in Scripture and Church History. He is especially interested in the way theology and spirituality come together in the practice of Christian worship. When not thinking about such heavenly things, he enjoys going on hikes through the woods, snapping photographs, and dozing in sunbeams next to his border collie pup, Sammie.
