The Church is the Presence of the Poor, Not Butts In Pews
There’s this classic short definition of the church in the Augsburg Confession I’ve sat with often: “The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.”
I’ve always appreciated this article of the confession. It is designed primarily to address what is “sufficient” for the church. It’s a kind of ecclesiological Occam’s razor.
The article goes on to say: “It is not necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by humans, should be everywhere alike.”
So you can have icons in worship, or not. And music doesn’t have to be the same everywhere. There’s not one type of building required for church. You can add prayers to the saints if you want but they aren’t necessary. Etc.
The essentials are: Preach the gospel. Administer the sacraments.
That’s it.
However, on another level this definition of the church has consistently troubled me, because it hyper-focuses “the church” on worship. It’s like, as long as we go to church on Sunday morning and do these two things the right way, that’s “church.”
Fast forward to 2022, and this is why the NY Times can publish an ableist essay by an Anglican priest about doing away with live-stream options for worship, because from their perspective, if we don’t get all the people together at the same time for worship, then the church isn’t quite as “church” as it could be.
Well, setting aside for a minute whether virtual worship is less “embodied” than gathered liturgy (I don’t think it is, but the Luddites seem super afraid of anything new or virtual), we might ask a more basic question at this point in the pandemic: Is Sunday worship the “main thing”?
Is it sufficient for the visible church to preach rightly and administer the sacraments, or is there another mark of the church that is essential?
I think there is. And that third mark… ready for it?
The presence of the poor.
I have Ernst Käsemann to thank for this insight. A great New Testament theologian of the last century, his theology was deepened and transformed by the profound loss he suffered when his daughter Elizabeth was murdered alongside other local union organizers in Argentina in the 1970s.
For Käsemann, the presence of the poor meant “a resistance movement of the exalted Christ serving the freedom and liberation of the oppressed” (see his On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, and thanks to Ry O. Siggelkow for editing a newer collection of essays that centers this insight).
Christians like to talk about embodiment because there’s this whole doctrine of the Incarnation thing we have going with Jesus as the Son of God, fully human and fully divine. But then it seems both the Augsburg Confession, and popular Christianity more generally, think Jesus became incarnate of Mary just so we could have really crowded church pews on Sunday morning.
But I think if we pause for a minute, we’ll realize that as much as full churches for worship may boost the egos of preachers (and help with church finances, which to be fair, money does keep the lights on), the reality is that a “resistance movement of the exalted Christ serving the freedom and liberation of the oppressed” could include really great Sunday worship and preaching and sacraments, but is also much, much bigger than this.
The guest editorial in the NY Times would have been so much better if the author had this frame in mind. If one true mark of the church is the presence of the poor, she would have realized that accessibility isn’t the same for everyone. Turning off live-streams would actually cut some folks off from worship who have, perhaps for the first time, had access to worship because so many churches live-streamed during the pandemic.
Whether we are talking about the immuno-compromised, or trans people in small town America, or those with social anxiety, live-stream of worship was a life-line, and their presence via virtual media, quite the opposite from being a diminishment of embodiment, is precisely the completion and deepening of embodiment, specifically embodying the poor.
In addition, what we have learned during the pandemic is that each person, each household, each small group, can and should take on greater responsibility for their functioning as the resisting body of Christ in the world. In Sunday worship there might be a lot of gathered bodies, like physical sweating and eating bodies, but by no means does that guarantee such a body of people would then function as the body of Christ in the world.
You can be physically present and spiritually checked out. You can be in a crowd of people and not contributing spiritual gifts. Conversely, you might be alone in your bedroom watching the live-stream and more fervently alive in prayer and the spirit than anyone, and more engaged in resistance than the thousands who treat corporate worship as a passive experience much like watching a Netflix series.
So I’d propose, the next time you sit down and attempt to define the church, go ahead and keep the marks of preaching and sacraments. They’re crucial. But give that church stool a third leg so it doesn’t fall over. Complete the triangle and make the church as sturdy as it can be. Emphasize that church is only church in the presence of the poor.
With that third leg, preaching and the sacraments take on a 3-D poignancy otherwise lacking.