“What is the Church?”

The most recent article of the Canada Lutheran splashed this question across its cover. It sounds like an open-ended question with a myriad of possible answers. If you asked 5 different people sitting in the pews or watching online on Sunday mornings, you will get 5 different answers. Asking 5 different pastors might even yield 5 different answers. 

And yet, here we are, all participating and engaging in this thing called “church.” Somehow we figured out how to do something in common and we seem to carry with us some kind of agreement about what the body we all belong to is and what it is about. 

In our post-modern world, defining what the church is feels like it is something that we each get to do, that we can form and shape the church in whatever way suits us. One version of the church is all about fancy music and fancy liturgy. Another version is all about serving the local community through outreach, food banks, social programs, community meals. And still another has all the programs that someone of any age could need to feel a part of the group: children’s ministry, youth, young adults, families, men’s groups, women’s groups, seniors groups and so on… Still another is all about connections and fellowship and relationships –  a big happy family. 

If you visit enough churches, you will find versions of these and more across the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada, across North America, and the denominational spectrum. 

Post-modern Christianity can really be a choose-your-own-adventure reality. 

However as Lutherans, the answer to the question “What is the church?” might not be as open-ended as we sometimes act like. In fact, Martin Luther and the Reformers had a very specific and clear answer to this question. 

The church in the Reformers day was shaped by the Pope acting like an emperor, Bishops acting like princes and clergy who exploited the people. So the Reformers looked to have an answer that stripped away all human power and preference. They sought to articulate what the church was at its most essential.

What they came up with is written in the Augsburg Confession Article 7. “The Church is the assembly of believers where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered.” Or in other words, the church is:

• People of faith gathered together
• The Gospel proclaimed 
• People receiving baptism and communion

The next part might be surprising, even difficult, to hear: Everything beyond Word and Sacraments is secondary. Everything we do beyond gathering around the Word and Sacraments flows from that central foundation. 

That means that the way we worship, the programs we run, the committees that meet, the buildings that we build, the fellowship gatherings we host, the causes we undertake and so on, are things we do that are because of, or in support of, gathering around Word and Sacrament. 

The music and liturgy that we use in worship are meant to be an expression of our unity of the body. 

The outreach we do to feed the hungry are because God first feeds us in communion and transforms us into the Body of Christ – bread for the world. 

The programs we run: small groups, bible studies, youth, children’s ministry etc… are places to help us grow in faith by hearing the Gospel in new and different ways. 

The building, the fellowship events, the committees, the kind of coffee we drink, the pews we sit in, the lights and heat, the screens and bulletins, the bathrooms and couches, the eNews and volunteer teams etc… are pieces that exist in order to facilitate our gathering around Word and Sacrament. 

Even though so many of those things I listed above feel like they are essential to being church, they are actually secondary. Important, but secondary. When they serve the essential purpose of being a community around Word and Sacrament, they are worthwhile. But all too often the secondary things supplant the essential things. Suddenly Word and Sacrament takes a back seat to all the variety of versions of being church that each of us hold in our own minds and preference. More significantly, in times of change and transition – such as during the past 3 years – those secondary things that once served our gathering so well might begin to fail us or they might stop working all together. 

This is hard. Hard to understand how things that we thought were about what it meant to be church seem to be crumbling before us. Hard to let go of things that we thought were such an important part of being church. 

This is why we need to be reminded of the foundation, the core things that make us the church. “The church is the assembly of believers where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered.” And even when so much about being church is changing and different, this core remains. God transforms us into the One of Christ by gathering us around the good news of the Word that gives us life: Baptism that makes children of God, and Communion that makes us food for the world. 

I was sitting in the board room at church last week, having just finished two zoom meetings when the people I was meeting with arrived for my third meeting and told me that the Queen had died. 

I had just checked the news only about 45 minutes prior and knew that her doctors were concerned. Her family had been summoned and I had seen the Twitter reports that the BBC news readers were already in their black ties. This didn’t feel like the previous health scares. 

Most of us were either very young or not alive at all the last time a monarch died. While 3/4 of my lineage is Norwegian, a quarter of me is Scottish and Welsh.  

I am also the son and grandson of royal watchers, and so had to endure waiting in crowds for the briefest of glimpses of visiting royals growing up. I also had to watch royal weddings and funerals whenever they were broadcast on TV.  But I am sure that I am not the only one whose family had a love for royal things. 

Many of these images provided some of the touchstone moments of our history. Now we are about to witness another in about a week. 

As we grieve the Queen in the days to come, I cannot help but think of my own grandmother, 98 years old. From the same cohort and stock, she was a women whose life was also marked by service to her community as a Pastor’s wife. I am sure we all have loved ones in our lives who come to mind as we ponder the Queen’s 70-year legacy. As much as she was a remarkable woman, the Queen is also symbolic of an era of rapid innovation and loss, from World War 2 and the invention of TV all the way to the internet and COVID-19 Pandemic. 

As I talked with a parishioner this week, our discussion of the Queen led us to memories growing up in the horse a buggy, pre-electricity era. We compared that reality to the fact that my watch today can show pictures, tell me the weather, send text message and measure my heartbeat.

The Queen’s death is a time to grieve all the that has taken place during her reign and how the world in which she first ascended to the throne is completely different from the world she leaves behind.

Just in the days before the Queen died, we also bore witness to the terrible tragedy that just happened at James Smith Cree Nation and Weldon. Horrible acts of violence that will take a long time for families and communities to heal from. Not to mention that the story of the perpetrators of this violence is connected to Canada’s history of colonialism, most clearly symbolized by the Crown. 

They are reminders that in these days we are experiencing grief upon grief, and it is complicated and messy. 

As we contend with our experience of grief in the days to come, we will be reminded of all the change that happened in the world during these past 70 years. We also be reminded of how that change has impacted us personally. 

In a rapidly changing world, there is so much that we must leave behind, so much to feel as though we have lost. It will be a big change to see a different face on our coins, to sing God Save the King, to change the name of all the public institutions titled after the Queen that will now belong to the King. Reminders of change and loss, and I am not so certain that we are ready to find hope in the ‘new’ either quite yet.  

As we grieve the Queen and a changing world, the thing that we can hold onto is our faith. Perhaps more accurately, and what I often tell to families grieving a loved one, God is holding onto us. 

Even as we struggle with all that is taking place around us, even as we feel as though we are losing much to the pace of change, even as there is much grief to bear these days, God promises that we do not bear it alone. 

Instead, we bear it together, we navigate this changing world in the body of Christ, in community. We given each other to hold on to, and we are held by the love of God. God who knows grief and has walked this path before, and who will see us through to the other side.