Sabbatical Prayer Wednesdays 8:30-9:30pm
All are welcome at my house (4501 Holmes Run Parkway, 22304) again this Wednesday, and every Wednesday for the duration of the sabbatical. We’ll gather from 8:30 to 9:30 pm for half an hour of sabbatical-focused prayer and half an hour of fellowship. Same deal as before: just come on in. If the weather is nice we’ll be on the side porch. Join us from wherever you are if you can’t get out.
Jan’s Visit with Martha Holmes
Martha Holmes became a part of Fairlington Presbyterian Church when she sold movie tickets at the old Center Theatre on Quaker Lane where the church first met over 60 years ago. At the age of 95, she is our senior member. Martha now lives in Texas with her family and Jan visited her to ask about changes she’s seen through the years. As we’ve been discussing the use of words in these posts, note that Martha refers to “church” as the building or the worship time on Sunday, as many of us do.
Martha Holmes from Jan Edmiston on Vimeo.
The Word “Church”
During this past week’s Sunday morning conversation on “Using the Bulletin as a Tool for Hospitality” a participant raised concerns that in written communication we have been substituting other words for church.
It is a concern that I share and have been struggling with for some time (and I am not alone – Rev. Dr. Mark Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor, has an excellent series on the meaning of church on his website).
Church is an amazingly powerful word and an amazing concept. The theology that I grew up with in Calvinist circles (the same theology our denomination uses as its base) always taught me that church was not a building – it was the people. We, the children of God, are the church. Christ stakes his hopes for humanity in us, his church. This core theological belief has led to many of Jan’s sermons imploring us to “Try and be the church as opposed to merely going to church.” She blogged on this nuanced word use again earlier this week.
Yet, we often do not think of church as this. Even with many sermons and with our base theology on the word church, we likely have a different idea of what a church is. And it’s no wonder – even in the Calvinist circles I grew up in, I learned this nursery rhyme (and accompanying hand-motions pictured on the right) that you may know, too:
Here is the church,
Here is the steeple,
Open the doors,
See all the people.
Likewise, we make statements like these:
- I will meet you at church.
- Church got done late this morning.
These types of statements have us thinking of church as:
A service
A building
This view is also clearly reinforced by our wider culture. When movies talk about a church, it always has to do with a service or a building. Television shows, such as the Simpson, indicate church as something that we struggle to wake up for on Sunday morning or something to suffer through. Even if we reject the struggling to wake up for or suffer through, we likely implicitly agree with/understand the concept that church is something you go to. Not something that you are.
I think part of the reason for this is an epistemological bind that the word “church” puts us in. The word actually does not appear in the New Testament. Instead the word that is often translated as church in our English Bibles is actually ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) or literally “assembly, congregation, council.” The word church actually comes to us by way of Old English and West Germanic from the Greek word kuriakē, meaning “of the Lord.” The current English word church is likely a shortened version of “house of the Lord” (kuriakē oikia) and “congregation of the Lord” (ekklēsia kuriakē). So when we use the word church – it is no wonder that it is used for multiple things and has a tentative link with our theology – we’ve both lost things in translation and we are using it as shorthand for multiple concepts and ideas.
Over the last few months, in things like the bulletin we have been using words like “community” and “gathering” instead of the word church. After lots of thinking and many discussions, we had hoped that using these replacement words would provide a more precise usage of language and more explanatory of what we thought our church was. For both new guests and for our longtime members, we would use words with more precise meaning to actually link with the meaning of church that we were intending to use in each separate use.
This brings me back to the conversation on Sunday. As I said at the outset of this blog posting, I am concerned with using other words than church for who we are. Church is a powerful theological concept. We are the church. We are of God. I do not want to reject the biblical concept nor do I want to reject our theological view. We should use church.
But my concern is that we do not now think about church as being a people. We think about a building or a service. We are more likely to look at the picture on the left and think the church is what is containing the people instead of the people being the church. We can write “The Church Leaves to Serve” at the end of every worship service till the end of time and we still will not replace the implicit understanding of the word as a service or building.
So I ask each of you – how do we solve this? We will likely schedule an organized Sunday Morning Conversation this fall on the topic but that shouldn’t preclude us from discussing it this summer (and hopefully on this blog). Help us figure out the answers to some of these pressing complex questions:
- How we claim to be the church in the theological sense and the Biblical sense without losing things in translation?
- Would it help to refer to us, the people, as the church and other things as gatherings or the building?
- Do we go back to Greek and say things like “church community,” “church gathering,” and “church building” and explain that church means “of the Lord”?
- Or do we simply give in to our cultural understanding and continue to use church for multiple concepts?
- And how do we do any of these things while being precise and being true to who we are?
Resource: This American Life
Throughout the course of the summer I plan to share resources that are and continue to be helpful to me as I seek to grapple with and understand our changing times and our changing culture. (I wrote this post a few days ago, but Jan talked about this difficult work last night.)
The first resource is This American Life.
For the last 14 years This American Life has chronicled the lives of everyday Americans over public radio. Recently they started a TV series. Here’s how they describe what they do:
The radio and TV shows follow the same format. There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but, like we said, it’s sort of hard to describe. Probably the best way to understand the show is to start at our favorites page, though we have full guides to our TV show and our radio show, with clips. If you want to dive into the hundreds of episodes we’ve done over the years, there’s an archive of all our old radio shows and listings for all our TV episodes, too.
Jan Starts Sabbatical Today
This morning Jan reflected on the start of her sabbatical on her blog, A Church for Starving Artists:
“Everybody should get a paid sabbatical. Every parent who gets too little sleep because she works in an office all day to pay for all the essentials plus childcare, and then stays up late doing laundry and dishes. Every waiter who takes extra shifts to save for a condo. You get what I mean.”
A Church on Fire
At Sunday’s Pentecost Service, Jan preached of a church on fire. And she did not mean any of the church buildings that had burned down that you can find on Google.
She meant a church that at its core is burning with a passion for ministry and that shows the light of Christ.
I simply cannot get that metaphor out of my head. Fire is an amazing part of our world. From a physical object come light and heat and energy. It almost seems to come out of thin air. It keeps burning, uncontrollably and chaotically at times, unless someone puts it out. And at the end, it has changed everything. What was there before is no more. It has been transformed into something else.
We are a church that has claimed as its mission to be a “transforming force for good in the world in the name of Jesus Christ.” But I’ve always had trouble picturing what that meant. Transforming? Who? What? When? It’s so distant. Not real. Not possible here and now.
But a fire? I see that every day. I know how it can change and transform things. I know how fire has given us improved lives, warmth, civilization, and the ability to control the world around us. I also know that fire has the ability to destroy things and make things into ash or dust. There is a reason that our parents admonished us to be careful with fire and not to play with it. It has the potential to control us.
A church on fire would be chaotic and likely uncontrollable. It would change things – not always in ways that we would see as better. Yet, if we desire to live out our calling and mission in life, we need to embrace it. We should desire to be a church that is neither too cold and impersonal nor lukewarm and only going about its normal business. We should be thinking about how that church giving off the light of Christ and the warmth of all of our being could transform and change our corner of the world. In short – we should be the church on fire!
I wasn’t expecting it, but something changed. After Sunday, I no longer want to be just lukewarm and go about my normal church business; I want to be on fire. And my guess is that I am not alone – you do too. So this summer, as we journey through this time of sabbatical, I hope that we can collaborate on what should be our summer calling – discovering what a church on fire might look like and how we get there.
