The Shape of the Church to Come, Part IV

This is the fourth and final column in a series on “The Shape of the Church to Come.” When this article appeared, Graham Pulkingham was a contributing editor to Sojourners and one of the leaders of the Community of Celebration in Scotland, an international center for promoting church renewal.

What practical first steps can be taken by leaders at the local level to renew the church as a family community?

First, one can find others who have a like desire for renewal and draw them together as a family. If you are clergy, minimize your professional role and concentrate on being just another of God’s people. Create together a life in which you are all brothers and sisters, in which there is no essential differentiation according to authority, expertise, or role. This is not to say that there are no such differences, but to minimize their importance.

Consider together the meaning of family -- what it is, what it does. It is for raising the young, obviously, and for perpetuating traditions (i.e., for carrying on the “community” life). Its task is to create a peaceful, comfortable, loving environment where needs are readily met.

Extended family has to do with deeply committing yourself and your nuclear family to a larger group of people and together becoming a single social unit. It does not necessarily mean living under the same roof. There are often problems when families try to live together in cramped quarters. It is better to invite single people into your homes, if you will.

Extended family has to do with sharing: learn to share your finances, your families, your concerns, your lives. Create together a community that can run parallel to the institutional church. With care, you can live the life of the people of God without offending the official institution or compromising its integrity.

If you are clergy, creating community is a question of reorienting your life, not abandoning your job or your professional role. If, in your local situation, you can create a loving, supportive, committed extended family, the Spirit will show you ways to gracefully involve that family in the institutional church for which you are responsible. Because of their commitment to you, all of these family members must be involved in the church -- perhaps not in the structured leadership, but in attendance, financial support, prayer and intercession. Because of their commitment to you, they must do nothing to confuse or tarnish your relationship to the institution.

So if you are committed to the local church, and also living your life in a family where together you are working out the gifts and graces of the Spirit, surely the Spirit will show you ways to transfer those gifts and graces into life of the institution. And this will inevitably bring about a restructuring.

But restructuring is the conclusion, not the commencement. For these things have to do primarily, not with the ecclesiastical institution, but people’s lives. They happen as God’s people become a family together, experiencing his fullness of life.

Pastoral care, then, will be natural and integrated into the whole of life. This family milieu will become an instrument for training the young; men and women raised in this community can perform powerful ministries.

Through the dynamic of this family environment, the leadership capacities so desperately needed in the church today will emerge and begin to influence the leadership of the official institution. This will be renewal, and it will forge the shape of the church to come.

Starting a community within the church is probably one of the most difficult steps you will ever take. It would be so much easier for us clergy to bring others into our ministry as lay associates. That would not require altering the structure of things at all. We could be a sort of traffic director, and the lay people could be members of committees under our leadership. Or we might attempt a collegial approach to leadership, conferring with others at every step, taking their counsel and advice.

But the structure of the church would not then be altered. We would still be finally in control. One person still would be hired and held responsible for the family nature of the institution.

The challenge is not to change the structure, but to change your life so as to have an entirely new family experience. Opening your life comes before opening your ministry, and opening your ministry comes before changing the structure. The steps in this order will eventually change the structure.

This kind of restructuring in the institution can draw real persecution. Institutions deeply committed financially, politically, and historically do not change their structures easily -- and the current institution of the Christian church is deeply committed to its secular environment.

Change is painful. But such pain must be a normal burden for the people of God, who accept it. God will rescue his church, but, as always, the price to be paid for effective and radical change will be suffering and pain.

Yet renewal of this sort is absolutely necessary if the institutional church is to be the church of the future. But the people of God must not allow themselves to be conformed to anything that prevents them from living God’s life. If world forces make this happen, they must stand against the world and accept persecution and suffering, if necessary, for refusing to live on the world’s terms.

It does not much matter what shape the church has (in terms of social structure) as long as it encourages God’s people to live faithful lives patterned on Christ’s. In every age the church will take an institutional form, but its people -- the people of God -- must bend every effort toward being a family, in the simplest sense of the word.