A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a colleague who was thinking about leaving the church that they serve. Their story was a familiar one. When they started at this church a few years before the pandemic, it was already in need of some serious rehabilitation: people still clung to glory days that were a decade or more behind them; membership, engagement, and attendance were all significantly down from where they used to be; the congregation needed to find a new way to be the church if it wanted to survive more than another ten years; and it was heavily resistant to any real change.
And then the pandemic made everything worse. The progress that this pastor had made before the pandemic was effectively erased, the need for change was much more urgent, and the resistance was much stronger. Even though the congregation had been given an opportunity to make some real changes, it refused to even consider it. And, by the time I spoke to my colleague, it would be out of money in a few short months.
The church had gone from needing rehabilitation to needing hospice. And that was partly because of the pandemic. But it was also partly because the congregation had refused to actually do the work of rehabilitation. And this colleague—who had felt called to help this congregation through rehabilitation—was trying to discern whether they were called to care for this congregation during hospice.
I had already been thinking about the difference between the fundamental thing and the shape that the thing takes in the world. I had been thinking about that in terms of the church: the difference between the church and the church-shaped organization. But this conversation also got be thinking about it in terms of clergy: the difference between the call and the job.
So I’m going to take this post to talk about the church, and I’ll take the next post to talk about the call, and maybe they will make sense together.
I’m sure you know about hermit crabs. Unlike most other crustaceans, which have hard shells that protect them, hermit crabs are soft; they protect themselves by scavenging shells from other animals. Importantly, hermit crabs like snug shells, so as an individual hermit crab grows, it has to regularly abandon its old now-too-small shell and move into a new and larger one. Sometimes, they will even form vacancy chains around an empty shell, each hermit crab abandoning its own shell and moving into a larger one in turn.
For my purposes here, the crab is the thing, and the shell is the shape.
Theologians have talked about the difference between the capital-C Church and the lowercase-c church for, probably, as long as either of those has existed. The capital-C Church is the dispersed assembly of all true believers. The lowercase-c church—or, better, lowercase-c churches—are all of those little communities that gather together, worship, read scripture, provide charity, and do all of the other things that we think of when we talk about the little church down the road or the megachurch on the edge of town or that church that closed last week. The Church exists both inside and outside of churches; and, depending on how you understand things, some churches are entirely devoid of The Church.
That might be a useful distinction, but I doubt it. To me, the Church is that sense of communion that shows up wherever people are gathered as the body of Christ in this world. Sometimes, it shines through clearly. Sometimes, it is under layers of muck. But it is always there. And whenever we gather as that body—no matter who we are, no matter where we are on life’s journey, and no matter how good we are at it—the Church is present.
So the Church is still found inside and outside of churches. But I’m also pretty confident that every church has some Church in it, and all of us, just by trying to be a part of it, are a part of it.
The Church is the crab; it’s the thing. And churches are the shell; they are the shape.
And the Church can take all kinds of shapes. It can live in little country churches and in big multi-campus megachurches. It can live in churches that meet in a sanctuary on Sunday mornings and in churches that meet for dinner on Saturday nights. It can live in churches that only meet in person and in churches that only meet on the internet. It can live anywhere at all.
And it is really important not to confuse the thing with the shape.
There’s another layer here.
One the one hand, there is some core to First Congregational United Church of Christ—the church that I serve—that is, and always has been, and always will be First Congregational United Church of Christ. There is the thing.
On the other hand, First Congregational United Church of Christ has changed a lot over the last 180 years or so. Pastors and other people have come and gone. The congregation has moved from building to building. Bylaws and worship styles and ministries have changed, and changed again, and changed again. The thing has taken different shapes over the years.
And here lies the tension.
In order for the core to survive—and this is true in any congregation—the people of the congregation have to prioritize the thing over the shape. We have to be willing to change the shape if that is what will keep the thing healthy. And we need to recognize that if the thing is in the wrong shape, it will die, and, quite possibly, something else will come along and scavenge the shape. That something else might keep the same name, and the same style, and some of the same people; but it will not be the same thing.
Every church is a hermit crab: it has to be in the right shell, and if it stays in the wrong shell it will stagnate and die, and that means changing shells when the time is right.
But it is also true that a lot of church people like the shape. And a lot of church people will prioritize the shape over the thing; they will prioritize the beauty of the shell over the survival of the crab. And by doing that, they will—unwittingly, I’m sure—let their own church fade away until there is nothing there but an empty shell.
I don’t know my colleague’s church well enough to tell you what happened there. But the story that they told me made it sound a lot like that church had prioritized their shell over their crab, their shape over their thing, their church-shaped object over their church (whether that was the capital-C Church or just the church that their congregation had been for however many decades).
And if you have served a church—or even simply been part of a church for any length of time—you have almost certainly seen that happen.
And that is the reason that it’s important for any church to talk about vision, identity, and purpose—and whether the shape that the church is taking is the right one for that vision, identity, and purpose—all the time. It is a matter of being true to who we are. It is a matter of survival.
And that’s not just true for churches. That’s true for pastors. That’s true for everyone.
But that’s another post.