The Pandemic and the Shape of Church
by Revd Dr Sam Wells - March 2021
Sam Wells suggests that one effect of the pandemic could be a humbler church with a bigger God.
I don’t believe the pandemic has introduced any particular new theological truth. But I do believe it’s been a refiner’s fire that’s revealed a number of dynamics that were previously much more hidden, and that there are ways we can distinguish Before Covid, BC, from After Covid, AC.
AC I see a humbler church with a bigger God. I want to explain what I mean by that. The French philosopher Michel de Certeau distinguishes between a strategy and a tactic. A strategy builds a citadel, and from its control base makes forays into the hinterland. A tactic has no home base, nowhere to store its booty, and survives by hand-to-hand encounters on the ground. I want to put these contrasting concepts to use with a broad distinction.
Here are two familiar sentiments. ‘Make me a channel of your peace,’ says the 1967 hymn based on a prayer written in France in 1912 and widely, though mistakenly, attributed to St Francis. ‘Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours.’ So says the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila. I want to highlight what these two sentiments have in common. They assume what I’m going to call a strategy church. A strategy church makes two assumptions that I think are relevant to our BC/AC discussion. The first is an unspoken sense that Jesus ascended before he’d actually finished his work amongst us, and that therefore it falls to us, his beloved and chosen followers, to complete the work he was too busy or distracted to attend to. The second is that if one imagines an hourglass, with the top and much larger part being heaven and the bottom and smaller part being earthly existence, and Jesus being the aperture through which the angels ascend and descend between the two, then we, more precisely the church, currently constitute that aperture. The church is the principal and definitive way in which God continues to work in the world after the manner of Christ’s incarnation.
Now let me contrast this picture with what I’m going to call tactic church. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places, says the Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.’ Notice how this tactic language differs from the assumptions of a strategy church. In this version the church doesn’t have to be source from which all blessings flow. A colleague told me about three women who attended a church BC. The church had to shut for a few weeks for repairs. So the three women made a plan. One went to car boot sales each Sunday morning, met and talked to the regulars, formed relationships and learned much. Another went to Sunday league football games and had a similar experience. A third went to an Ikea store and got to know staff and customers. After a few weeks the three women compared notes, and had enough information to become excited about what they were discovering and understanding. When the time came that church reopened after the refit, they had a genuine quandary about whether to return or whether to continue in their explorations. One of them explained, ‘Our God is now too big to fit back into our church.’ What they were naming was their discovery of tactic church. Tactic church does not assume everything God is doing comes through the church. It doesn’t assume the best example of God’s ways is always the church. It rejoices to discover the surprises of what the Spirit is doing in unexpected places through unheralded people. Tactic church entails a humbler church; but apprehends a bigger God.
What I’m describing imitates the transformation described in Second Isaiah. In exile, beleaguered and bereft, Israel learned that its God was a much bigger God – the God of the whole world. But it also learned that God was more than happy to use agents other than itself such as Cyrus who didn’t even claim to know Israel’s God. That’s the discovery we now need to recall.
The pandemic has so far had two key phases with different characteristics, each of which has proved a litmus test for the church. The first phase was a rapid, collective confrontation with mortality. A culture that has largely succeeded in its project of denying, delaying and distracting from death suddenly had to face the prospect of mass mortality. While that prospect didn’t fully materialise, the litmus test for the church was, is the church a reliable, gentle, and trustworthy presence in the face of death? The final test of a friend is, ‘Would I want you beside me on my deathbed?’ The point is not fundamentally about whether churches were open or not. It’s about whether, in the face of the world’s preoccupations and the church’s obsessions, the church was able to show its true colours when the whole country was confronted with fear, isolation, grief, powerlessness and despair. If so, it proved itself a true companion to the nation. If not, it failed at its moment of greatest possibility.
The second phase, which we’re still in, is characterised by patience, confusion, and hardship. While the most important thing in ministry is to be with people in the most challenging moments of their lives, most of all as they face death, the most frequent calling of ministry to be an abiding presence as people address, over the long term, problems that won’t go away, situations for which there’s no quick fix, and issues that leave them feeling powerless. Some of this ministry is exercised by simply paying sustained attention; some again by entering with people deeper into the mystery than they could dare to go alone; some again by renarrating their experience as part of a larger story. Whichever it is, the key question remains, has the church proved itself over the last year to be a good companion in uncertain and troubling times, not eager to find a false solution or collude in the culture of anger and blame?
When you’ve been through a crisis with someone, you may return to a previous level of relationship, but you never forget what you discovered about that person and about your relationship in that intense time. What we’re experiencing is not something that’s primarily or fundamentally happening to the church; it’s something that’s almost uniquely happening to the whole world, and the church’s true colours are being revealed by whether it has been able to face the challenge on the one hand of mortality and on the other hand of extended uncertainty and dislocation. This should be the church’s natural habitat. After all, death and resurrection are the epicentre of Christianity, and Egypt and Babylon, the locations of extended discomfort and dislocation, are the crucible of the Old Testament, where God was made known like no other moment. If there’s been anger and blame, it’s arisen out of clergy and laypeople’s feelings of irrelevance and powerlessness – feelings that no amount of home food delivery or frenetic online communication can alleviate. These feelings of irrelevance and powerlessness are not to be brushed aside or regarded as signs of immaturity. They can be a stimulus to rediscover a tactic church when the strategy church is no longer fit for purpose.
We can put a lot of energy into taking church online, and it can do a lot of good in reimagining and re-evaluating what we do and why. We can make education, board meetings, synods and international links so much cheaper, more nimble and less cumbersome by removing the labour of travel and hospitality. All of these things can change the shape of the church. But these changes are superficial if they’re not grounded in a renewal of our calling to be with people facing mortality and living with uncertainty. Those who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world should find in us sure and certain hope of God’s eternal changelessness.
The transformation from being a strategy church to a tactic church isn’t a downgrade, a downsize, or what’s today euphemistically known as a restructure. Its success isn’t to be judged by the number of hits on YouTube or the quantity of column inches in the national press that no one reads anymore but everyone still wants to be quoted in. Christianity isn’t a popularity contest where getting a lot of retweets gets us nearer to the kingdom. It’s an encounter with truth, to the bottom of our souls and to the very heart of God. The pandemic has been a complete nightmare, but it can still be a gift, if it restores our clarity about our core purpose: to be with people in the night-time of their fear with faith, hope and love in the God who, in Christ, heals our past and frees our future.
Revd Dr Sam Wells is Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and a widely known preacher, pastor, writer, broadcaster, and theologian. He has served as a Church of England parish priest for 23 years. He also spent 7 years in North Carolina, where he was Dean of Duke University Chapel.
Sam is also Visiting Professor of Christian Ethics at King’s College London. He has published 39 books, including academic studies and textbooks in Christian ethics, and explorations of liturgy, preaching, faith, welfare, and mission. His most recent book is A Cross in the Heart of God (Canterbury 2019).