Dear ______:
Sounds like the first summer of seminary has brought to light a common problem: You no longer have a church. Yes, you do need a church.
Yes, as I wrote last week this season is a great opportunity to visit churches of other traditions. But you still need one church to be your community, your support, your home base.
Is seminary better than church?
Those who go leave their church to attend a residential seminary often face this challenge.
- You find yourself surrounded by the good fellowship of other students.
- You have people pray with.
- You worship with them in chapel.
Sometimes seminary is like the church on steroids. With so many friends who are passionate and growing, it can seem better than your old church.
So who needs a church? You need a church.
Seminary is not a church
Your seminary is a ministry of the church. So of course it does things that any community of Christians should do.
But it is not itself a church. Or to speak more accurately, it is not a congregation.
- It may or may not have steady pastoral leadership.
- It likely does not have the structure of governance and leadership that that any denomination would say its congregations need.
- It does not start with babies and new believers, and walk with them, building their lives as disciples, all the way to the grave.
- It typically does not even have a Sunday service, a mark of Christian congregations since the Book of Acts.
The seminary, is a temporary Christian community, nurturing the faith of those who are accepted to its programs.
The seminary, at its core, is an academic institution. It is a place to earn the degree required of ministers in your denomination. It just happens to be a Christian academic institution, aiming to form you as a fit leader for the Church. So of course it does many of the things a congregation will do — but it will leave others undone.
You need a church
Many of your needs for learning and nurture will be met by the community in seminary. But many won’t. You may not feel those needs acutely, but they are still there.
- You need the seven-day rhythm of life, with worship and sacrament on the Lord’s Day.
- You need to hear the Word in ways that point you away from the enmeshed life of seminary and into the ordinary wider world.
- You need all the generations of God’s people — crying babies, goofy teens, elders wise and frail.
- You need continuity. Each intense class comes to an end. Come graduation time, one third of your friendship network moves on.
But the congregation? It just hangs on in there.
It takes work of course. You have to make an effort to let some of your roots grow in a congregation when your relationships in seminary are so intense.
Make your life match your message
But there is one more thing: Being part of a congregation now will prevent you from feeling like a hypocrite later.
If you are called to be a pastor of a congregation, you will work day in and day out to get people to worship weekly, and to anchor their Christian lives in the church.
Those people live in a culture that has a thousand alternatives to participating in your congregation. Many of those alternatives are more intense than church life. Many overlap with the church and meet some of the same needs.
If you come to be a pastor after a three year vacation from a congregation, your life will bear witness to your belief that the church is optional.
So find a congregation. Show up for worship. Put down some roots.
Blessings,
Gary
Thanks for this post Gary! I’ve been trying to articulate a parallel research question. Currently I state it as: what is asked of a church in its community dimension?
I’m not satisfied with that phrasing though—social? communal? economic? communion? These all seem too narrow. I just watched a documentary on the Knights of Columbus and the founder had high hopes for what his parish offered beyond Sundays.
As a member of a congregation, what responsibilities can (or should!) the “young pastor” expect?
Thanks for posting your comment Susanna! Sorry it took a bit for me to reply.
I find my mind going in what I think of as simple elemental directions. Seems to me that a congregation has the responsibility to consider its community dimension, and to measure it theologically or spiritually rather than simply socially.
That is, many congregations I have encountered seem to think the necessary thing is to simply create opportunities for social interaction — coffee hour and pot luck dinners. I suppose that in our atomized, individualized culture even this is progress.
However, I suspect that if we started by trying to mold our social opportunities to biblical priorities we would be more likely to create something richer: you know, like the four thigs mentioned in Acts 2 as marking the earliest Christian community — the Apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, and prayer.
I think personally that it would be a mistake to say that x y or z must be fully achieved to be legit Christian community, since we’ll always be failing and striving. But if we chose wise landmarks to steer the ship by, we’ll be more likely to succeed.
Thanks Gary! Your impulse toward the biblical elements as measuring rod is where I”d start too and where I’ll start with my church class this fall. Biblical fellowship—I”d like to consider more deeply what is asked there—-sharing common life seems a key element, once big piece of that being economic life.
On the side of practice, for Catholics today the tendency is to lean heavily on mass as hitting all those priorities at once—and only an hour a week too! We’re covered! We get suspicious of “adding to perfection.”
At the same time, we do love the usual donughts, pot lucks, processions and devotions, and, more recently, trend toward committee meetings and faith sharing groups. But these days, with a few exceptions, most Catholics in the US are not participating in these for all kinds of reasons, some very good. The recent emphasis on the family as primary evangelizer puts the action of encountering Christ in community back into livingrooms. I’m not the first to point out the severance there.