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“SO A WELL-FUNCTIONING CHRISTIAN

COMMUNITY IS GOING TO BE ONE IN WHICH

EVERYONE IS WORKING STEADILY TO RELEASE

THE GIFTS OF OTHERS.”

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GOD IN COMPANY

By Rowan Williams, an excerpt from Tokens of Trust p. 105-112

AND I BELIEVE ONE CATHOLIC AND APOSTOLIC CHURCH

Breathing the air of Christ, Christ becoming the ‘atmosphere’ in which we live- to borrow the language of a great New Testament scholar, C. F. D. Moule – isn’t only about being in a state of peace but about being in what some would call a ‘dynamic equilibrium.’ Our peace is what it is because it is a flow of unbroken activity, the constant maintenance of relation and growth as we give into each others’ lives and receive from each other, so that we advance in trust and confidence with one another and God. So it is that when the Creed moves us on to speak about believing in the Holy Spirit, it also moves us on to speak about our confidence, our trust in the Church.

For some, this feels awkward. Surely, we don’t believe in the Church in the sense that we believe in God or in Christ? It’s a fair point; and in fact, it’s already there in the original Greek of the Nicene creed, which says literally that we believe the Church. The Church is indeed not another reality on the same level as the Father, the Son and the Spirit. But it is a community we can trust. Just as we can trust God because he has no agenda that is not for our good, so we can trust the Church because it is the sort of community it is, a community of active peacemaking and peacekeeping where no one exists in isolation or grows up in isolation or suffers in isolation. The slogan of the Church’s life is ‘not without the other’; no I without a you, no you without a we. Yet that doesn’t mean that the identity of the Church is a ‘herd’ identity, with everyone’s individuality submerged in the collective. The difference between I and you remains real difference – otherwise there would be no challenge about it. You may have noticed that few churches are characterized by drab sameness; when people try to create a herd mentality in the Church, whether in a local congregation or in a wider institution, it tends to break down dramatically, sooner or later.

So, believing in the Church is really believing in the unique gift of the other that God has given you to live with. The New Testament sees the Church as a community in which each person has a gift that only they can give into the common life. We Christians are so used to the imagery the Bible uses, especially the great metaphor of Christ’s ‘Body’, that we forget just how radical and comprehensive is the vision of a community of universal giftedness. The ancient world had sometimes used the image of the body to describe a society in which there were different functions, a very natural use for such language. But it was left to Christians to reconceive this in terms of different

gifts, and to draw out the further revolutionary implication, that the frustration of any one member is the frustration of all – because then there is something that is not being properly given. Someone has not been granted the freedom to offer what only they can give to the whole.

When St. Paul speaks about the Church as the Body of Christ, especially in his letters to Christians in Rome and Corinth, this is what is at the forefront of his mind. The Church is a diverse community, but its diversity is not just a natural diversity of temperaments or preferences – we trivialize the idea if that’s all there is to it. It has a diversity of gifts given by the Spirit, a diversity of relationships with God, we might say, out of which come divine perspectives on God and diverse ways of making God’s work real for each other.

And this is an intensely practical and moral principle – indeed you could rightly say that for St. Paul this was where all Christian morality started. Look, for example, at the Second Letter to the Corinthians (chapters 8 and 9), where Paul is writing about the question of the relative wealth and poverty of different churches. Some have more than they need, others don’t have enough. This means that some are being frustrated in what they are free to give. So, Paul says to the wealthier churches, ‘Equip them from what you don’t need; and who knows? They may be able to give to you in due course.’ It’s a very basic and simple application of a principle that permeates the whole of Paul’s vision. If you have a gift, it’s there so that you can help another to become a giver in turn. God’s gift makes givers. But notice too how the converse works: later in the same letter, Paul speaks about his own experience of being made to suffer when other Christians are made to suffer. ‘Who is weak, and I am not weak?’ he asks. When another Christian is frustrated, held back from growing, Paul too is held back. We grow only together.

It is, incidentally, a powerful indication of what is new and mysterious about the role of ministry in the Christian community. The apostle, the public witness of Jesus’ resurrection, who directs the thoughts and prayers of the Church, is the one in whom the porous boundaries of life in Christ are most pronounced, the one who senses most acutely both the joy and the pain of other believers. The apostle’s ministry is thus not essentially one of control but one of literal compassion, suffering with, and congratulation, rejoicing with. That is something to ponder for those of us who hold ‘apostolic’ roles in the Church; it should not be like the priesthoods and hierarchies of ancient religion, because it is to do with inhabiting the common life with a particular intensity, so that the minister can point with authority to what is basic in this common life. Being a Christian priest or minister isn’t about managing religious technology for an

uninstructed public, but about witnessing to the distinctive character of a common life in which each depends on all.

So, a well-functioning Christian community is going to be one in which everyone is working steadily to release the gifts of others. And this is not for the sake of some abstract self fulfilment: the Christian community is not a place where everyone is crying out, ‘Get out of my way so that I can exercise my gift’ (though the phenomenon is not unknown…). In the context of the ‘Body’, the gift of each is inseparable from the need of each. The giver has to understand both how the gift is to be given into the common life and has to be aware of what the common life and the obstinate reality of others must give for one’s own life to be real and solid. What you could call the ‘density’ of relationships in the Church has to do with the attention that everyone is called to, attention to yourself, to each other and to the whole complex in which God is at work. Once we have grasped that the gift of each is unique, we have to learn equally that the need of each is unique and is just as much to do with God.

C. S. Lewis once famously described a ‘charitable’ person in these terms: ‘She lived for others; you could tell the others by their hunted look.’ We can think about our gifts as though they licensed us to impose what we had to give; we can think about our gifts as though we had nothing to receive; and we can think about our needs in dependent and immature ways. But the solid reality of a really functioning Christian community is like that of a good marriage in which mutual attention, giving and receiving, enjoyment and sacrifice are tightly woven together, as both realize that there is nothing good for one that is not good for both, nothing bad for one that is not bad for both, that fullness of life is necessarily a collaborative thing. Church history or no church history, we need moments when we can say, ‘that’s what I mean by church.’ And so when we try to think through just what it is we are trusting or believing when we say we believe the church, we need two things. First, we need a way of thinking about the church that allows us to say that on certain particular occasions, when the Christian community is doing certain particular things, we know that this is what the church really is, independent of our successes and failures, our efforts or our laziness. We need to be able to tell stories of the unexpected points at which the church comes through. In addition to the regular, theologically defined moments when the church is supposed to be just the church, it helps to have the flashing out of this in specific bits of human experience. Just as, earlier on, we were noting how language about God only comes alive when we can tell stories of human lives in which we can see what ‘God’ actually means, so also with the church.

Please visit our website jaxcathedral.org for more information on these and other offerings.

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ART AS SPIRITUALITY Poetry, Portraits and Personalities in Pentecost Led by Linda Privitera and Joe O’Shields Thursdays, June 3 – July 15 at 7 p.m. on Zoom Join Joe and Linda for an exploration of Biblical persons in scripture, poetry and art. Explore, with some humor and fresh insights, the spirit moving between us as we expand our understanding of some familiar stories. Eve, Mary, Hagar, and others.

CATHEDRAL READS Monthly, 1st Thursday at 3:30 p.m. on Zoom A book study led by various members of the Cathedral congregation. Some of the books are written by the guest author to be featured in upcoming EBA Conversations and some are written by other contemporary writers and theologians.

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CONTRIBUTORS The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead, Dean, St. John’s Cathedral The Reverend Dr. Linda Privitera, St. John’s Cathedral Dr. Rowan Williams 104th Archbishop of Canterbury The Society of St. John the Evangelist North American Congregation, Boston, Massachusetts

CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY EDITORIAL BOARD Owene Courtney The Reverend Gregg Kaufman Joe O’Shields The Reverend Dr. Linda Privitera Nancy Purcell

ADVISORS The Reverend Dr. Bob Dannals The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead

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“OUR CAPACITY TO CHOOSE THE PATH

OF FAITH AND HEALTH EMANATES FROM

THE QUALITY OF OUR SPIRITUAL FITNESS.

THIS FITNESS INCLUDES OPENNESS TO THE

SPIRIT IN PRAYER, BEING A COMMITTED AND

PARTICIPATING PART OF A FAITH-FILLED

FELLOWSHIP AND BEING GROUNDED IN

SCRIPTURE AND SACRAMENTS.”

~ THE REV. DR. BOB DANNALS

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