Today’s unruly church is still salvific

I got chatting with a fellow mom at a parent-and-tot drop-in in my neighbourhood recently. She asked me casually what I do for a living. 

I took a deep breath, smiled and answered, “I’m a pastor. Like, at a church.” She gave me the same confused look I’ve seen many times by now. 

Rest assured, it never bothers me. It’s a completely understandable response, given that, even apart from being a woman, the average pastor in Canada today is about 23 years older than me. With my messy bun up, my diaper bag strapped around my arm and toddler in tow, I look nothing like what people expect of a clergy.

It’s similar out in the pews to what it is in leadership. The hair colour of the Canadian church is largely grey, and people my age are enjoying Sunday brunch far more often than opting for a religious service. God knows what the future will hold for the church in Canada in the years to come.

Pessimistic predictions abound, but recent research has certainly surprised statisticians. For the first time of my life, church decline is slowing compared to previous years. For the past five years, the number of people in the U.S. who say they are Christians has hovered between 60-64 percent, with no further decline in sight. In the U.K., young people in particular are wandering back into the pews, earnest and seeking. While no research has been done to show if this is taking place in Canada, my anecdotal experience as a local pastor tells me something is on the horizon here, too. It’s too soon to say what has changed, but my interest is piqued – maybe those seekers are seeing what I’m coming to see. 

Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus

I walked through the doors of seminary in 2018, but I caveated my presence there to everyone I met. “No, I don’t want to be a parish pastor. Anything but a pastor.” 

I had spent enough time in pews in my lifetime to know the dangers of the unruly beast that is organized religion. “You won’t find me in a consistory meeting to save my life,” I insisted. 

I had every intention to do what the majority of seminary graduates are doing now – counselling, spiritual direction or chaplaincy. But through a strange series of events, like Jonah in Nineveh, God brought me to a church and led me to pastor there. 

And to my surprise, I delight in that unruly beast every day.

Maybe the seed was planted in my Systematic Theology class, where we read the great third-century African saint, Cyprian of Carthage. He is famous for his provocative adage, “extra ecclesiam nulla salus,” translated in English, “apart from the church there is no salvation.”

Initially, my modern mind balked at the narrowness of his claim. But out of respect for the ancient saint, I sat up in my classroom chair wanting to hear him out. Even now, I sit in the front pew every Sunday, blazer buttoned, sermon notes in hand, congregation behind me, altar before me, curious and open to the strange words of St. Cyprian.

Meal trains and communion

I was sitting with my siblings and dad last winter, eight months pregnant, eating chicken and rice in my living room, when I first started to think Cyprian might be right. It wasn’t even 48 hours after my too-young mom’s tragic death that the church had organized a meal train for us and filled every slot with promises of home-cooked meals. 

I talked with one of my congregants just last week about this experience, and she knew immediately what I meant. Still recovering from surgery after a cancer scare, she was also still eating leftovers from a church-organized meal train that wrapped around her like a hug when she needed it most. Having not grown up in church, she had joyful tears in her eyes, grateful beyond words for the institution of church. “My pain was so great, it was too big for a few friendly individuals to hold. I needed the whole community to carry me,” she said.

Karen Stiller experienced the same thing after the passing of her spouse, which she writes about in her latest book. “In the valley of the shadow of death, there is casserole,” she muses; even when God seems absent, the church is there, lasagna in hand.

The church offers more than just the comfort of being in community, I’m told by the unchurched people who have been coming through the doors of my church recently. It’s the reverence, the ancient ritual, the bigger-than-myself feeling. To put it plainly, it’s God. 

Of course, the God I know isn’t stuffed into a sacred building, never to be found elsewhere. God is out in the streets, flowing in the river, dancing in the wind, hiding in the unlikely places. But God’s name isn’t uttered there like it is in the church. Maybe the bluntness of saying God’s name is what’s refreshing to these religious newcomers. 

Every week, I name God’s name at the altar. I take the loaf and goblet, lift them up and say, “This is Christ’s body and blood, broken for you.” And every week we don’t just witness God, don’t just feel God, don’t just talk to God or talk about God, we eat God. We digest God. We can’t quite name it, but something different, something salvific happens. Just as St. Cyprian promised.

Broken for you

I wish I could say it’s only ever lovely investing in organized religion, but the beast is still unruly. I have learned to ride my bike to my denomination’s local meetings, because I know I’ll need the exercise after. I need to sweat it out after the tense, troubling, keyed-up and high-strung forums I sit through. Not even Robert’s rules can prevent the spitfire.

It’s hard, I know. We have much to wrestle through. There is much to mourn. There are wounds a thousand casseroles can’t heal, tears that bread and wine don’t seem to wipe away. 

This is a season of reckoning for the church. It’s a season of meetings we’d best bike to, or maybe run from. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I look ahead to the decades before me of investment in the church, and to any of us committed to a congregation, I picture dirt in our nails, maybe scars on our palms. Maybe like the firstborn from the dead, a lifetime in church will kill us before it resurrects us. Much like anything worth doing in life.

The church is something holy, something wild and vast, something to revere, something to wrestle with, something to challenge, something to love and hate and love again. I hope all these young people filtering in these days aren’t expecting her to be tame. Her salvific balm is hard-won, but humbly, I think it’s there, at the heart of the beast.