My son recently arrived home after an almost five-month, 2200-mile journey hiking the Appalachian Trail.  No surprise, he had many tales to tell.  One story involved a man he met somewhere in the middle of the hike.  This man declared that he had shaken free of the capitalist system and had taken to the freedom of the woods and mountains.  Sure, he may have sported an array of expensive, high-end equipment, but he felt that he had freed himself from the shackles of the ordinary system of life in the United States.  He also claimed to have shaken himself free of the system of religion, although he had not rejected religion altogether.  My son remembers him stating that he belonged to “Christianity, not churchianity.”

This little nugget of story has lodged itself in my brain and I’ve been reflecting on it over this past week.  There is an important truth in the difference between the Church and Christ.  While churches may claim allegiance to Christ, that Christ is the “Head” of the local church (as in the case of Congregational and United Church of Christ churches), and that the church seeks to love and follow Jesus, no church can assert a thorough and complete knowledge of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ’s intentions or expectations.  Each church and denomination is but a small window into an understanding of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

It’s too bad that most, if not all, churches and denominations fail miserably when it comes to recognizing how little we human beings can reasonably understand about the God we claim to be so wondrous and amazing.

I’m reminded of some of the especially illuminating observations of Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite Christian writers who died just over a year ago.  In his book Telling Secrets, Rev. Buechner offers this summary of the difference between churches and self-help groups:

I do not believe that such groups as these which I found my way to not long after returning from Wheaton College, or Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the group they all grew out of, are perfect any more than anything human is perfect, but I believe that the Church has an enormous amount to learn from them. I also believe that what goes on in them is far closer to what Christ meant his Church to be, and what it originally was, than much of what goes on in most churches I know. These groups have no buildings or official leadership or money. They have no rummage sales, no altar guilds, no every-member canvases. They have no preachers, no choirs, no liturgy, no real estate. They have no creeds. They have no program. They make you wonder if the best thing that could happen to many a church might not be to have its building burn down and to lose all its money. Then all that the people would have left would be God and each other. 

Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner (1991)

In another book, Wishful Thinking, Rev. Buechner makes this bold claim: “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me’ (John 14:6). He didn’t say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn’t say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could ‘come to the Father.’ He said that it was only by him by living, participating in, being caught up by the way of life that he embodied, that was his way.” [Wishful Thinking, 1971]

Churches have much to learn when it comes to claims regarding their relationship with Christ.  When churches imply, or even state, that they possess the one and only truth about the Divine, they are really attaching themselves to and marketing idolatry. I don’t think I need to say that this is very dangerous.

There’s also an important bit of wisdom in the perception that the church is not a building. I take some issue with the need for choirs, liturgy and even preachers(!), since I believe that groups of the faithful need some structure (by “structure,” I’m not talking walls and a roof) and a mode and method of worship. But, churches are not buildings. Where the faithful gather is a place that is nothing more than a convenient space in which we gather for worship. We could be anywhere and in any space, but we choose to have a building that makes everything a little easier— except when we start to think that the building, especially any one particular building, is so necessary for the worship of God that without it, there is no church.

At Old South, we have much work to do to disentangle ourselves from our sanctuary building. It is a lovely building, no question, but it has become a serious problem. We are too small of a congregation to meet the needs of such a large, aging, demanding building with new leaks regularly making themselves known and plaster falling from the high ceilings and from around the large stained glass windows. But, probably our most serious work will be in disentangling ourselves from the notion that the building IS the church, that somehow it is that one building that allows us to worship God. We need to reacquaint ourselves with what the faith actually is and what it means. It’s not about walls and architecture. It’s about people and the lives that we live.

We must resist the temptation (for a temptation it surely is) to get so caught up in the granite and mortar (Old South’s sanctuary building is constructed of granite) that we lose sight of getting caught up in endeavoring to embody Christ in who we are and what we do.