“I hope you realize that there are a lot of us who are just hanging on by our fingernails at the moment.” That’s what a long-standing member of one of our congregations said to me back in December. The context was the continued media attention here in England to the terrible abuse perpetrated by John Smyth, the well-organized cover-up of his actions in the early 1980s, and the subsequent failures on the part of church officers to take effective action when allegations began to come to light. Although much of the story has been in the public domain for some years, its meticulous documentation in the Makin Report, released after multiple delays in early November, put it right back in the spotlight, ultimately triggering the unprecedented resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I realize that most readers of Covenant aren’t members of the Church of England and may not feel as affected by this situation as my parishioner. But the experience of having our confidence in the Church profoundly shaken is something that can happen to any of us. There are likely to come times when we find ourselves saying, in the grip of strong emotion: How could the church do this? How could the church let this happen? And how can I continue to belong to a church like that, and let myself be identified with it?
“The ultimate problem of the Church, the seat of the perplexity which surrounds all systematic thought about it, is the fact that it is at once holy and sinful.” Those words were written by Lesslie Newbigin, the great ecumenist and theologian of mission, in a book published in 1953. He was echoing Martin Luther’s description of the individual Christian, simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously justified yet sinful, but applying it to the Church. For Newbigin, to articulate an ecclesiology that was truly ecumenical and missional meant facing that disorienting fact and not trying to drain its force by introducing a too-comfortable distinction.
Catholic ecclesiology has tended to draw a line between the sinful members of the Church and the Church, which remains holy in spite of its members. But how can something be true of the Church that is not true of its members, of the persons whose communion in Christ constitutes its reality? Protestant ecclesiology, following Luther, according to Newbigin, substituted “at this critical point for the true and biblical dialectic of holy and sinful, a false and unbiblical dialectic of outward and inward, visible and invisible.” It was happy to concede the sinfulness of the visible Church, maintaining the undisturbed holiness of the invisible Church beyond it. But what is the purpose of the Church on earth, if it communicates nothing of God’s sanctifying power?
When our confidence in the Church is profoundly shaken today, perhaps we’re more likely to take refuge in a version of that Protestant response. We can brace ourselves to agree with secularist critics that the visible Church, as institution and community, can be no better than any other institution or community, and that delusions that it could or should be are in fact a contributing factor in its well-attested failings. Of course, holiness is a fine aspiration, we might conclude, but we should not expect to find it securely present anywhere around us. How many of the Church’s reputed saints might have been able to hide sins as serious as Smyth’s, or worse, in times of its comprehensive political dominance? If we expect nothing very much from the Church, then at least we won’t be disappointed.
Such a response strikes me as unsatisfactory and for a number of reasons. Perhaps most fundamentally, this response is problematic because it risks giving up on the gospel as the truth about the Church and the world. The good news that Jesus announces at the beginning of his ministry is that the reign of God has come near — so repent and believe. The Church exists because people have received him in welcoming his word: they recognize that in him the reign of God has come among us, and they repent and believe because of it. The Church is constituted by such faithful and hopeful repentance, in a turning to Christ that both believes in and hopes for the coming of God’s kingdom amongst us, on earth as in heaven.
As we begin this Lent, we acknowledge that what we long for most deeply is something for which we have no right, something for which we have become radically unfit — that holy kingdom of God, which is our deepest desire but we cannot build for ourselves. And yet it remains the unshakeable purpose of God for us, and therefore in joy and hope we turn to Christ Jesus, the one who walked the way of the cross for us, and in whom all God’s promises are “yes.”
We repent, then, confident in being met by God’s mercy and its sanctifying power, through which we may, after all, be made fit to receive the gift of his atoning death and life-giving resurrection.
Repenting in trust and hope: this is what the Church does. This is what the Church is, as the ecumenical Groupe des Dombes expressed it: its identity is found in conversion, “a shifting of the center, an exodus, a transition, a paschal movement.” Because that movement defines it, the movement from sin and death to righteousness and life, the Church is always in the present age both sinful and holy, simul iustus et peccator, passing over from destructive sin to life-giving holiness in union with Christ.
We should not, therefore, be surprised that sins still clings to the Church (Rom. 7, Heb. 12.1–2), which is not to say that we should accept it as no more or less than the way things are: sin is intolerable for those caught up in this movement, who are called to resist it, fight it, unmask it. But the sin that clings so closely does not tell us what the Church finally is; the Church is formed by what it moves toward, as it looks to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Only in its faithful turning to him can its true character become clear: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
If something along those lines is accepted, then we also need to think carefully about what we mean by the “visible” Church. It can’t just be equated with what may be seen by any journalist, sociologist, or supposedly neutral observer. The Church as it truly is here on earth requires eyes illuminated by faith to begin to fathom its present reality, as the systematic theologian John Webster argued.
I know I wouldn’t find it easy to explain all this to my distressed church members, clinging to faith and Church by their fingernails. But perhaps I might try to say something like this: as the fellowship of the baptized, the Church is the company of those who turn to Christ, in hopeful repentance. If you can no longer see any trace of that turning to Christ in the Church of England, no resonance with the turning to Christ you are wanting to make yourself, then perhaps it is indeed time to seek Christian community elsewhere. But if you can, let’s keep walking the way of repentance and hope together, following the one who laid down his life for our sake and, being raised again, always comes to meet us with his grace.
The Rev. Dr. Jeremy Worthen is the Team Rector of Ashford in the Diocese of Canterbury. He previously worked in ministerial formation and in supporting national ecumenical and theological work.