When church buildings were closed during Covid lockdowns, it was often pointed out that the church was not the building, but the people. This is an important truth but it is not the whole truth. Place can and does play an important part in our worship because we are embodied creatures. Many wonderful churches worship in halls or classrooms or homes, yet a church building can be a place not only where holy things happen, but a place which is itself holy, incarnational; stone and wood and glass and bread and wine, loved and set aside for prayer and devotion.
Whenever I pass an open church, I always want to go inside. I let my eyes adjust to the dim light, light a candle, find a corner that gives me a glimpse of something that will lift my head. I think that there is a very different feel to churches in which reserved sacrament is reverently housed, with the accompanying red light burning night and day. In these places the air itself feels full of God’s presence and it seems easier to pray. When I enter churches like this I am reminded that there exists another dimension of sacredness and mystery that is easy to lose sight of in daily life. It is the gift given by a church, which is itself a place of pilgrimage, rather than a neutral building where people gather to worship God. But all kinds of churches have their own gifts to offer.
In Sunday’s gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus asks Peter “Who do you say that I am?” Impulsive Peter, who sometimes gets it so very wrong, gives on this occasion an inspired response: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus is deeply blessed and affirmed by this, receiving it as a gift from God. He goes on to commission Peter, with this revelation, to be the rock upon which the church is to be built. From the very start we recognise that the church is an article of faith, not just a voluntary association of like-minded people. The foundation of the church is Jesus Christ.
If the church is our mother, she is sometimes an abusive mother, and how does a child recover from that?
In the West these days there is a mass exodus from the church, and those of us in the church must take responsibility. Many cannot bear the trauma or abuse of power they have experienced or witnessed others experiencing at the hands of the church. If the church is our mother, she is sometimes an abusive mother, and how does a child recover from that? Yet despite all this, there always remain parts of Christ’s beloved church bearing faithful witness to the love of God for all that he has made.
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In seeking to understand the church, the body is a helpful biblical metaphor because the parts of the body are so varied – visible and invisible – yet dependent upon each other for the whole to function as it should. The church is multifaceted, like a diamond. No one part of the church lives a perfect balance of worship and witness, action and contemplation, listening and proclaiming. We need each other. The body of Christ on Earth. An ark sailing upon floodwaters. A lighthouse beckoning ships to safety. A vine, a bride, a sacrament, a sanctuary. An institution. An agent of the Kingdom of God. A community of sinners who know they are forgiven. A hospital, a rescue shop, a foretaste of heaven.
Rowan Williams paints a fruitful picture of the church that frees us from a faith that depends heavily on what individuals decide and on what goes on inside our own heads. He sees the church as “a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be – God’s sons and daughters. What we have to do ... is not first to organise it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape. It is a place where we can see properly – God, God’s creation, ourselves.”