“If only...”

On loving the Church we’ve been given

I was conversation with a friend the other day of the type that anyone involved in the Church will find themselves having from time to time. We began innocuously enough, chatting about how much we appreciate and admire some aspect of Anglicanism. It doesn’t really matter what that was; it could have been almost anything. It could have been praise worship or solemn high Mass; saving the parish or the fact that the Church is finally breaking free of it. It could even have been entirely tribal— “This is what I love about my brand of Anglicanism”.

There’s nothing especially wrong with that. In fact, it seems like a fairly healthy place for a conversation about the Church to begin: with a shared delight. And our next step was also natural enough. We lamented that more people don’t share our delight. We’d found something deep and meaningful that we desperately wanted others to share, too. But, in making this move, we also began to pass from appreciation to complaint. We started grumbling about how the wider Church isn’t exemplifying what we deeply love.

This rhetorical move is also familiar. Some might put it in a mild, aspirational way, often introduced with the words “If only...” If only the Church would let go of its love of status. If only more churches would see that if they sang contemporary songs they’d get more young people. If only the Church would be braver in confronting social injustice. Something along those lines. But, it can also take a more judgemental turn, usually beginning with the words “The problem with the Church today...” I suspect you can finish that sentence yourself.

I suppose not much harm is done if the conversation ends there. Two friends are simply delighting in something they both love about the Church while lamenting that others don’t do the same. The complaint tarnishes the enjoyment a little, but the impulse behind it needn’t be especially sinful. We all wish more people shared our tastes and interests; we all long for others to feel the delight we feel.

But a common further step is what should give us pause. Very often the conversation moves into a more evangelistic register. Having stated our love and lamented the wider Church’s failure to share it, we decide that our love is the solution to the Church’s problems. If only the Church forced traditionalists to leave then we might begin to grow. If only the Church stopped trying to be so progressive, people might take it more seriously. If only x happened, we tell ourselves, then things might turn around. If only we could recreate the Church in our own image, all would be well. If only…

I think it’s at this moment when the conversation stops being about the Church at all and starts being about us.

Of course, we don’t see it that way. Most of us belong to a tribe—Liberal or Traditional Catholic, Conservative or Open Evangelical, and every shade between—that falls somewhere along the double axis of ideology and churchmanship. The tribe declares and manifests the ambition so the individual doesn’t have to own it alone: it isn’t I who would remake the Church in my likeness; it’s simply that my kind of Anglican has got it right in the way others haven’t. If more people were like us, the Church might begin to thrive again.

And this is where something sulphurous happens. We begin by loving something about the Church. But gradually we make the object of our love the measure of the Church. We mistake our own reflection for the truth. Our competing ecclesiologies all suffer from this narcissism. Ultimately, they’re inward looking, locating ecclesial righteousness among their own company, while laying all the sins of the Church at the feet of everyone else. We’ve taken one of the most demanding questions Christianity asks—what is God doing in the world?—and substituted an easier one: what would the Church look like if people agreed with us?

Anglicanism has a particularly long history of this sort of argument. We’ve been trying to remake our Church in our own image since before Cartwright argued with Whitgift and Hooker with Travers. Our old boast, ecclesia semper reformanda, can be a humble warning against a self-satisfied Church; it can just as easily become cover for ceaseless tribal warfare, each side certain that reform means becoming more like it.

Perhaps this helps explain one of Anglicanism’s more eccentric characteristics: our knack for being perpetually unhappy with the Church we actually belong to. Our history can be seen as a contest between those who want it to be more like the Calvinists, or the Deists, or Roman Catholicism, or charismatic churches. Tellingly, some of our fiercest tribal battles broke out during the nineteenth century, when the Church of England stood at the very zenith of its power and influence. Abundance, it turns out, doesn’t cure the appetite for sectarian purity. Perhaps it feeds it.

Fortunately, if our history teaches us anything, it’s that no single tribe is ever as dominant as it imagines itself to be. What has saved us, more often than not, is simply that no Anglican tribe has ever been strong enough to win outright or for very long. We call this comprehension, usually with a strong whiff of self-satisfaction. “It shows that we’re not close-minded”, we smugly announce, “unlike other churches” (we whisper behind our hand). We like to believe that we eagerly hold together what others would split apart.

But comprehension achieved by stalemate isn’t the same as comprehension chosen in love, and we should be honest about the difference. We’re like a set of exhausted fighters, boasting of their mutual tolerance only after years of failing to knock each other flat.

I don’t raise this to add my own “if only” to the list—if only we would stop saying “if only” then everything would be fine. Instead, I want simply to suggest that “if only” is doing us real spiritual harm. It lets us treat our discontent as prophecy or, worse, a kind of righteousness. In fact, it just plain old impatience with a Church that stubbornly refuses to be what we would design if God had been foolish enough to make us its architects.

More importantly, it lets us defer the harder work of being the Church indefinitely. We can always wait for the reform that would finally make faithfulness easy. We can imagine that somewhere over the horizon there’s a Church in which our particular anxieties have been resolved, our preferred theology has prevailed, and everyone else has finally seen the light. We can yearn for the day when I’m not bound by baptism in deep communion with those whose views I despise.

Meanwhile, the actual Church is there in front of us, asking something of us now.

So the question we need to ask ourselves isn’t “What would the Church have to become for me to love her completely?” That’s to engage in fantasy, and it doesn’t really get us anywhere. The harder question, the one that demands something of us, is simply this: “What has the Church I actually belong to, as she actually is, called from me this week, and did I give it?”

That is the Church permixta—Augustine’s term for the Church as a mixed body of the holy and the sinful—to which we all actually belong rather than the fantastical Church we long for. Ours is the church with the leaky roof and the elderly congregation; with the congregation that expects much but gives little; filled with people whose politics we can’t stand and whose need is nonetheless real; set in the world God so loves, rather than in the one we would remake before deigning to love it ourselves. The Christian life is lived in the particular. We don’t get to love humanity or the Church in the abstract, nor are we asked to be faithful to the Church of our own imagining. We’re given these people, this place, this moment—and asked to love them all.

That, after all, is the strange particularity of the Incarnation. God didn’t wait for the world to become more congenial before entering it. There were some in Jesus’ day who believed that Israel needed to purify itself and return to righteousness in preparation for God’s promised redemption. Yet the astonishing thing is that God didn’t wait for Israel—or the world—to become worthy of his coming. Christ was born in a first-century Judean backwater, among particular people, into a particular culture, and a particular history. If God could bear to be born into that particularity, without waiting for it to become something more to his liking, it seems a modest enough ask that we do the same.

In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine says of flies and other pests that “it was for the taming of our pride these things were created to be troublesome to us”. Perhaps that’s why he also created even stranger things: eccentric Anglo-Catholics, clap-happy Evangelicals, cantankerous conservatives, and smug progressives.

I don’t think that those of us prone to “if only” conversations should stop loving what we love about the Church or even grieving whatever we think is genuinely missing. But perhaps we need to learn to be better about receiving with gratitude the Church God has actually given us. The Church, like the people in it, is particular, imperfect, inconvenient and often surprising. Perhaps, in the end, faithfulness begins when we stop asking God to give us a better Church and start asking him how we should serve and love the one he has called us to be part of. In the end, that’s the only true Church any of us will ever belong to on this side of the grave.