Church as Community
Rosemary Radford Ruether

The Catholic Church in which I grew up made no claims to be a community. The church I attended as a child was a large Jesuit parish in Washington D.C. near Georgetown University. Liturgy was grand and preaching serious, but there were no activities for lay people to participate in, nor was anyone looking for such participation. No one greeted you when you went in or shook your hand during the mass. Usually you hurried away afterwards without talking to anyone, anxious to get home for breakfast.

You went to Church to go to Mass, to fulfill your Sunday obligation and to receive communion. It was incidental if it happened to be an interesting and meaningful experience. The emphasis was on the objective means of grace which transmitted this mysterious spiritual stuff that united you to God through the mediation of the institutional vehicles of the church. I remember seeing a sign for a Protestant community church that beckoned passersby with the come-on "end your search for a friendly church". I thought of this as a humorously banal view of what a church is for and joked to a Lutheran friend that the one thing you could say about the Catholic Church, "it was not a friendly church."

I am not sure when I began to think that the church should be a community. Probably it had to do with church reform movements that responded to Vatican II. My husband and I became third order Benedictine oblates, and thus had the sense of belonging to a special community of this Benedictine tradition that got together for weekends together periodically. We began to hear a theology of the church as community that was coming from the church renewal movement. We also became involved in the civil rights movement and found a community of Christians there that thought of their social justice involvement as the expression of being church for them. We began to search out church gatherings that functioned as community. For a while we belonged to an ecumenical community, the Community of Christ, that saw itself as having a covenantal relationship together.

In those heady days there was an assumption that we were the avante garde of a transformation that would soon sweep the whole Catholic Church. Soon all local Catholic parishes would turn their altars around, learn to shake hands and even embrace and begin to gather for worship as an expression of being a community. Some of that has happened in some places. The university parish that we attend in Evanston invites everyone to introduce themselves to those around them at the start of the liturgy. We hug or shake hands at the kiss of peace, and there is a sense of having some friends with whom you might like to talk at the end of the service. There are a number of small groups that do things together, and the tone of the preaching is one of friendly and yet inspiring communication. But if I had a real problem I am not sure there would be anyone there to whom I could turn. It falls well short of the vision of church as community about which I have expended not a little ink in various writings over the years.

What does it mean to talk about church as community or community as church, and why should we expect these two terms to go together? Let me introduce this topic by a bit of historical background. The tension between institutional church and the hope for spirit-filled community is an old one in Christianity. The early church was primarily charismatic community with very little institutional apparatus. Leadership was drawn from those with recognized spiritual gifts of prophecy, healing and teaching. There was a certain breakdown of class, race and gender hierarchies, as women and men, from both slave, freedman and artisan classes gathered across ethnic lines in cities like Corinth, Alexandria and Rome. It is this pattern of new relations, seen as manifesting a new order of redemption, that is expressed in the baptismal formula in Paul's Letter to the Galatians, "In Christ no more Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female".

Gradually a hierarchical structure emerged, linking local congregations to a bishop in cities and then provinces of the empire, until the church began to approximate the bureaucratic system of Roman empire, under the bishops of capitol cities of the empire, Rome and Constantinople. This bureaucratic structure made it easy for the emperors to incorporate Catholic Christianity into the bureaucracy of the empire as the state church in the fourth century. People began to join the church, not out of deep conviction, but because it was the politically advantageous and then the necessary thing to do. Not to be a Catholic Christian was to be in trouble with the law.

But this development of Christendom or state Christianity quickly sparked new movements of committed community for those called to a deeply transformed life. Monastic community expressed this need for committed community of those seeking deep transformation within and against the bureaucratic church. Monastic movements continued to carry this vision through the middle ages and into modern times. But its structuring as homosocial celibate communities eliminated married men and women.

The later middle ages saw the birth of new forms of community life less removed from ordinary households than the great rural monastic establishments,, such as the Brethren of the Common Life and the Beguines who gathered in small groups in cities amidst ordinary people. Some of this pattern would be carried on in the Reformation with Anabaptist and Quaker communities that made adult commitment the basis of their gathering.

Abandoning celibacy, these groups became committed communal societies of families. But such counter-cultural communities, that gathered in deep personal experience of the Spirit and rejected the state churches, were persecuted by Catholics and magisterial Protestants alike.

As state Protestantism became more formal and established, new communal societies arose within them, such as the pietist and Methodist small church communities of the I7th I8th centuries, that developed eccesiolae en ecclesia; that is, little churches within the institutional churches. These were covenanted communities that gathered for prayer and mutual support, while also attending the formal liturgies of their parish churches.

A new reality has developed in the last 200 years in Europe and America. The state churches were dismantled or remain only as remnants in England, Germany or Spain. Religious pluralism is the reality for societies that separate church and state. But the thirst for small, committed communities remains. After Vatican II this was expressed among Catholics around in world in the birth of base communities or communidades ecclesiales de base in Latin America or small church communities in the United States and elsewhere.

Again, like the pietist and Methodist conventicles of the earlier centuries, these small communities understood themselves as remaining within the larger institutional church. They gathered for prayer, study, Bible reflection, sometimes informal eucharist and social engagement as small groups, while also attending parish liturgies. Some bishops embraced them as a means of evangelization or deepening the faith among committed groups of Christians. But they conceived of them hierarchically as under the parish priest, while supplementing his work through catechesis, particularly where the lack of priests made such pastors nominally in charge of large regions with tens of thousands of potential members of his 'flock.'

Some Latin American base communities became parishes with a great variety of small group teams within the local church. One handbook on forming Christian base communities that I picked up from Brazil, for example, depicts the community of Santa Lucia as like a circle with Christ as the center. Around Christ circle many team groups that facilitate the work of the community. There is a team that facilitates the liturgy which includes both the priest and a circle of men and women. There are other teams that do catechesis, study groups, organizing of a union of domestic workers, outreach to improve the neighborhood, and others. The picture that depicts the community of Santa Lucia as a circle of groups contrasts it with an image of the church as hierarchy, organizing like a pyramid, with the Pope at the top, then descending ranks of bishops, priests, nuns and a crowd of inferior laity at the bottom. The people are then depicted in another image as attaching ropes to the church as a distant cathedral to pull it out of the clouds and bring it down to earth.

These pictures give a vivid sense of how these base communities were defining themselves over against what they saw as a distorted church as hierarchical institution, in contrast to the church as community. But the hierarchical church did not long tolerate this kind of democratic transformation from the base. Conservative bishops engaged in a campaign to repress the base community movement. The Vatican has adopted a policy of replacing retiring progressive bishops with highly conservative ones. These conservative bishops has acted quickly to close the catechetical institutions that helped train lay leaders of base communities, as well as priests and nuns to work directly and in a collegial way with the people. The theologians who taught in these progressive institutions, such as the one founded by Bishop Helder Camera in Recife, Brazil, were all fired. Leading Catholic liberation theologians today tend to find support in progressive Protestant institutions, while Pentacostal churches which give people a vivid feeling of community, but often little social critique, are growing. By repressing base communities the Catholic hierarchy is losing the Latin American masses.

This repression of base communities in Latin America is a recent example of the ongoing conflict through the centuries between the church as institution and church renewal movements that seek to re-present the church as spirit-filled community. The result is either a destruction or co-optation of such renewal movements in a much reduced form, or else alienation. The new communities separate from the institutional church and reject it as evil. But this means that they shortly much institutionalize themselves, becoming new historical churches which often take on their own rigid forms. We saw the cycle of this pattern in the Reformation and many times since. Is there any way of overcome this cycle of either repression or schism in the movements of church renewal community building?

The problem that creates this cycle lies primarily, it seems to me, in a false understanding of the church as historical institution. The error of historical church institution lies in its effort to make claims of spiritual efficacy for its purely institutional forms of mediation of words, symbols and rituals. The institution claims to possess the Holy Spirit under the control of its institutional channels and to be the sole cause of grace, rather than understanding itself as at best a context and occasion where experiences of the Spirit may take place. It institutionalizes forms of religious meaning and pretends that these are the only valid channels of grace. It claims that only the words preached by the ordained whom it has designated and whose theology it controls preach a valid Word of God and only the rituals it validates mediate relation to God.

In so doing the institutional church creates a sacramental materialism that teaches people that only the actions of the validly ordained, according to its rubrics, can cause the gracious life of God to be present, and that they do this simply by performing the ritual acts whether or not either the priest or the people interiorize this meaning. In traditional language, this means by sacraments work ex opere operato, or by the act itself

The communication of grace, in other words, it presented as happening magically, without real conviction or experience or meaning on the side of either officiant or recipients. The church thus creates a false faith in the spiritual power of material acts. It asserts that spiritual power is available because the historical church stands in a legitimate succession of transmission through episcopal succession that goes back to apostles ordained by Christ and so it and it alone is the church founded by Christ.

This legitimizing myth of apostolic succession needs to be reexamined. It is historically false that Jesus founded or intended to found such a historical church with a hierarchical government based on the model of the Roman empire. As we have seen, the apostolic church was a voluntaristic community with charismatic forms of ministry and little sense of a need to form a historical institution, since they expected the end of the world very soon. The institutional church of episcopal hierarchy is not the successor of this apostolic church, but it arose by suppressing this apostolic church.

However this does not mean that institutionalization as such is illegitimate. There are necessary roles for historical institutions. They are need to transmit tradition from generation to generation, to create the forms of education both for the young and for those who are to be adult leaders, to preserve historical memory, to relate communities to each other, and to guard against abuse of power. These are all important roles. Spirit filled communities depend on historical institutions to play these roles, and not to have to duplicate these roles themselves.

Thus what is to be rejected is not institutionalization as such, but the myth of institution; namely, that a particular institution has been founded by Christ, and it and it alone can transmit grace through its material forms simply by performing ritual acts. The Christian churches, in all their historical expressions, need to accept their historical relativity. There is no original right church structure founded by Christ which alone transmits grace. Christ did not found a group of apostles to be bishops of dioceses (the term diocese itself is a fourth century term for a province of the Roman empire). Much less did Christ found the papacy, itself modeled after the Roman emperor and his bureaucracy in Rome.

The only legitimate discussion of church structure is not whether Christ founded it., but whether it is the kind of polity that is capable of both assuring a responsible transmission of the tradition and also of being open to the new movements of the Spirit by which the meaning of the tradition can come alive anew in each new generation. This means the institution must understand its own relativity and secondary supportive role to communities. What historical institutions transmit is not the Spirit or the living presence of God. but rather forms of interpretation of the presence of God that have been shaped by past historical experiences of encounter with God and reflection on these experiences.

At their best institutions carry with them some collective wisdom about what has worked and what has not worked, how to best support communities without stifling their creative self-development, also how ecstatic experience can be abused by power mongers and charlatans and how to guard against such abuse, how best to draw people in different age groups and cultures into learning and participation. All this cultural heritage is very important. But it is dead without living persons who, in each particular time and context, engage in opening themselves to God in their lives, transforming their lives and interpreting this transforming experience in ways that communicate this experience to others. This is the Spirit actually alive in our midst.

At their best historical institutions create the occasions for the experience of the Spirit. But they don't and cannot cause the Spirit to be present, for this can only break in from direct encounter of living persons with God. Historical institutions also transmit a culture of interpretation of such spiritual encounters, but this culture of interpretation cannot be closed and finalized. It is, at best, an open system of symbolism that gives helpful guidelines to interpret new experience and translate it into daily life. But the living encounter with the Spirit must also be an occasion for new appropriations of meaning by which a given culture of interpretation is itself reinterpreted. Tradition, to remain alive, must be open to this process of continual reshaping of interpretive culture by new spiritual experiences.

For many Catholics this rich union of tradition and openness to creativity in community is not a possibility. The local parishes available to us are alienating, and even offensive. For some this is due to the sexist language and male priesthood which rejects in principle the possibility of women's full and equal membership in the church. This is re- enforced by a style of preaching and doing liturgy that exudes the dominance of clergy over laity. Going to church becomes an enraging, not a nurturing experience. There are also issues of celibacy or married priesthood, divorce and remarriage and birth control that are all hanging fire In our church. All these issues are seen as unchangeable in the dominant view of the magisterium, even though these teachings have lost credibility for the majority of Catholics.

Moreover since these teachings and structures are claimed to be fixed, eternal and unchangeable, there seems little reason to believe that sticking around can lead to change. The church becomes a dysfunctional institution, which not only has developed a style that repels spirit-filled community, but has idolized that style as divinely given and inerrant. Thus the church makes itself irreformable, immune to the Holy Spirit as transformer. For those seeking meaningful life against such dysfunctional institutions, there seems no possibility but to form autonomous communities that become church for them.

The question for autonomous communities seeking to be church for spiritually hungry and thirsty people is how much of the traditional church functions does one attempt to duplicate? Does one seek only a relatively small group that offers discussion, mutual support and informal prayer? Do we decide to form a eucharistic community that has a more formal liturgy of Bible reading, reflection and blessing and sharing eucharist? Do we do this as a lay community without an ordained priest? In my view a community of Christians is empowered to do this, for what makes Christ present is the coming together in faith, not a special power available only to the ordained. But the decision to do a eucharistic liturgy involves the community in more formal organizing, perhaps rotating teams that regularly prepare a liturgy. Well done liturgy takes skill, knowledge of resources and creative work.

If the group has children, they may also be seeking catechesis, the development of a program of education in the faith for the children. This too takes time, skill and resources. Perhaps there is also a desire for some social outreach, an involvement in some issue of justice in society. If the group begins to grow beyond what can fit in a family living and dining room, there is a need to find a more suitable space in which to meet, perhaps a school unused on Sundays. As more organization and time becomes involved, the issue of a paid staff person may arise, at least on a part time basis. How does the community come up with the funds for this? Finally there is the question of governance. How are these decisions made? Is there a town meeting of the whole group periodically for make major policy decisions, while ongoing work of different sectors is left to volunteer teams?

In short one begins to develop some of the structures of an institution. One discovers it is not easy to run a church, even for fifty people. How does one deal with conflict, disatisfaction, charges that a small clique is running everything and not allowing equal participation? To sustain life-giving community is time consuming and labor intensive, not easy to do when it is work done in one's spare time, and not one's regular job.

My own experiences of such options at this point may be helpful. Our family belonged for some years when we lived in Washington D.C. to a covenanted community of about fifty or sixty people, mostly Lutherans and Catholics, that called itself the Community of Christ. It had a part time pastor who was freed by his church to work to develop this community, while being paid for work in a church agency. His wife also functioned as an unpaid but active co-pastor. This group also had an extraordinary high level of theologically trained people, ex-priests and nuns, a Catholic layman who worked for the Liturgical Conference and was highly creative in creating liturgical experiences, myself as a theologian teaching in a seminary, etc. Thus we had a rich assortment of skills for shaping church community.

The community met in one another's houses, having decided to live near one another in an inner city neighborhood. We rented a space for Sunday liturgy. We had bi- annual retreats for two days in which we discussed what commitments we wanted to make for the next six months and how we wanted to run the community. At the conclusion of each retreat we formally covenanted together to do these things, and signed a book of the covenant. At one point a group in the community decided they wanted to run and book and art store with a small coffee bar attached, that would become their social outreach to the community. Small lectures and discussion groups could also take place there We agreed to support them in this project, and this became a major activity for the community.

This covenanted community worked well as both community and as church that provided a range of church activities, good liturgy, study groups, catechesis for children, social outreach and a plan of governance that assured participation of all adults. But this was an unusually skilled group with builtin advantages of a pastoral team that could give time to this work of community building. Could a group with less of an array of educational skills and available time have pulled off such a community?

Since I have come to Evanston I have not sought out or attempted to create such an alternative church. The university parish provides good enough liturgy and community life. My teaching and writing take a great deal of time and also is my major way of contributing to the larger church ecumenically. I lecture world wide. Thus I bring my ideas of what church and Christian life should be to Christians around the world and am well aware that my work is read even in Catholic seminaries, sometimes clandestinely and sometimes officially.

What is lacking in depth of community relations in the university parish is made up for by forming a small covenant group of ten to twelve people. This group has now been together for about six years. We had an earlier covenant group that met together for many years, but broke up as members changed their lives and moved from the area. These covenant groups meet only one a month and do not attempt to provide liturgy, study or social action. Since the members are mostly teachers at a theological seminary or pastors, our study and teaching needs are well cared for. Also all are involved actively in their own parishes. Many also have some social justice outreach through others networks to which we belong.

Our covenant group meets for about three hours. We include a meal and then an in depth checking-in with what is happening in each person's life. We conclude with simple prayer. We offer prayer and personal support for crisis that one or another of us may be going through. In one case we helped one couple go through a divorce. Each person can share issues that they may not feel free to talk about any place else. But we don't substitute for therapy. We are a deep community of friends. This is the kind of gathering that can be duplicated for many people within a busy work schedule. But it does demand the discipline of deep openness with each other that is not easy in our society.

My own preference is to keep a creative dialectic of chosen community and historical church. Most of us don't have the time or skills to shepherd a full blown substitute for a parish church. When we try to do that we soon discover that some of the alienating problems we have with existing institutions can be duplicated in miniature by ourselves. Smaller groups that gather for a meal, deep conversation, and prayer pose less of these organizational problems. Yet many still hunger for satisfying liturgy and speaking spiritual truth, as well as involvement in social transformation.

For many, like myself, this means having our eggs in many baskets, finding a satisfying liturgy in a church, forming a covenant group where deep friendship is experienced and doing social action through many networks in Chicago and around the world. Ideally, I would like to have these several aspects of what I understand to be Christian life unified in one place, but this does not seem to be possible most of the time.

For me it is important not simply to withdraw into small community without feeding back critical and creative insights to the larger Christian community. However intransigent the top of the Catholic hierarchy has made itself, Catholics at the base hunger for truth and spiritual creativity. Those of us with some ideas and experiences of what that means, have a responsibility to contribute to feeding some of that hunger of others, as well as feeding ourselves. These do not need to stand in contradiction. The more we are well nurtured spiritually, the better we can help nurture others. To minister to others and to be ministered to is a reciprocal process of spiritual growth, not two sides of a hierarchical dualism. Once we put back together what clericalism has split apart, the Spirit come alive in our midst as mutual life-giving. This is what community as church and church as community is all about.

Talk given at Wisconsin Call To Action meeting in May, 1998