Have you ever heard someone say that their relationship with God is just fine but their relationship with the Church isn’t? Some say that their relationship with God is better without the Church. The Church is an easy target for blame, and sometimes it’s understandable. The Church has needed to be reformed throughout the centuries. The Church is comprised of sinners and fallible humans, who are sometimes on their worst behavior. The Church has aided and abetted crusades, mass murder, and has covered up heinous crimes. We all know this as a simple fact of history. And yet, the Church’s true identity can’t be equated with the frailty of human nature. The Church’s true identity is found in Christ, who is the head of the Church and the author of salvation.
The Church is not merely an earthly organization. The Church has a heavenly calling. The Church’s origins are holy. The Church is essential for the salvation of the entire world. Orthodox priest and theologian John Behr puts it this way: “the church—the ekklesia that is embodied, manifest, realized in each local community—is not simply a community of those called out from the world into yet another grouping in the world, alongside many other bodies but rather those who are called out into the life of the new creation, the eighth day, and are already anticipating that eschatological reality” (In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2025, 90). Or as Behr also says, drawing on the teachings of the early Church fathers, the Church is “a virginal mother, granting life to those who are born in her womb through their death in confession of Christ” (81). In other words, it is through our participation in the life of the Church that we participate in the paschal mystery, by which we die to an old way of living and rise to a new one in Christ. And in that death and new birth from the womb of the Church, we become truly alive. This is the “life” we hear so often of in John’s Gospel. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus shows us the way to the Father, who gives us life in the power of the Spirit because of Christ’s own death and resurrection. In connecting the Church to life itself, Cyprian of Carthage put it more bluntly, and yet we should not dismiss the truth of his words because they sting a bit: “You cannot have God for your Father if you no longer have the Church for your mother” (quoted in Behr, In Accordance with the Scriptures, 76).
It sometimes seems in vogue these days to criticize the Church. It’s not that the Church is never in error or reform, it’s just that the fallibility of the Church is no reason to give up on it. The Church is called to holiness, to growth into perfection, not infallibility. The Church’s mission and identity are held in the arms of God, and because the Church is God’s gift to the world, it is through our own participation in the mystery of the Church and in her sacraments and in her very life that we are strengthened to grow more into the likeness of God in whose image we were created.
A “mission” divorced from the Church is really no mission at all, because God himself is mission. For us to properly discern our place and work in the world, we need the Church. The Church, of which Christ is the head, is intended for the healing of the world. This is why, each week at Mass, we bring the cares and troubles of the world that are on our hearts into the church, and we present them at the altar. We embody our priestly vocation in the Mass, in which, following in the way of our Great High Priest, Jesus Christ, we offer to God prayers for the entire world. The shape of the liturgy, the pattern of the Church’s life, and spiritual practices that come with being a member of the Church, all play a part in how we are changed from the transformation of the world.
When we talk about membership in the Church, it is not the same as membership in a cricket club or a country club or an extracurricular organization (see Fr. Behr’s words above). Membership in the Church is death to sin and all that is not of God so that we may be born again in the womb of mother Church. And this is why being a part of the Church requires not just a part of us—that is, what’s convenient to give—but all of us, “our selves, souls and bodies,” to use language from the prayer book. Through our participation in the life of the Church—which is the very life of Christ, who is her head—we learn what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus. Taking up our cross is about self-giving. For those in the early Church, taking up the cross often meant death. Martyrs were, quite literally in the Greek, witnesses—witnesses to what it means to die to self, and be born again through the Church’s womb into new life.
These days in a complacent culture, our witness will probably look different than the martyrs of old. Death for us may not mean a martyr’s death, but death will mean dying to our own comfort for the sake of the well-being of the whole body of Christ. Death will mean offering back to God—as priests of God—the gifts God has given us. Death will mean that God becomes the center of our lives instead of those things that promise us happiness but fail to deliver. Death will mean prioritizing the time we give to God and his Church over all other commitments. Death will mean that the spiritual practice of sacrificially giving “our” money to God—i.e., the Church—will challenge our priorities and comfort. But it is only in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Last Sunday’s Old Testament reading from the Book of Deuteronomy put the choice before us in stark, binary terms: choose life, not death, by walking in the ways of God. By choosing the Church and fully living into our membership in that holy fellowship of those both in heaven and on earth who are constantly being born more fully into the likeness of God, we choose life. We choose life, not on the world’s terms of comfort and complacency, but on the terms of the cross, which tells us that although we may seem to give up everything, including our physical life itself, we gain something far greater—real life, true life, eternal life.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle