As the prospect of another lockdown looms there are understandable anxieties and concerns. Many will be wondering if they have the resilience for yet another change to life’s structures… financial worries will be lurking for many, questions about job security and income… fears about the levels of disruption… questions about whether our society and its institutions will be overwhelmed…. what will this mean in real terms for schools, NHS, emergency services…
And in the midst of it all, where does ‘church’ fit?
It has become clear that Christian thinking on this is not at all uniform. Over the last months, and through a previous lockdown, there was a litany of arguments about why we didn’t need to worry about the fact that our Churches were closed. The Church is the people… we’re fine meeting online - indeed we might be better off… the public gathering for worship isn’t essential to Christian devotion… Church buildings aren’t even really necessary, or maybe even desirable in the first place…
Whilst I understand the desire to accomodate circumstances that are beyond our control, and to avoid additional stress at a times such as this, I also wonder if we need to do some heart-searching and some Bible-searching. The impending lockdown has several notable differences to the first one, and those differences raise deep questions about whether the closure of Churches throughout November is a purely health-related decision or an ideological one. When everything was shut, the case for Churches to conform was at least sustainable. But when the Government begins to discriminate between aspects of society, saying which are ‘essential’ (and thus free to remain open and functioning) and which are not (and are therefore shut), we find ourselves in a very different ball game.
The Church in the UK is in danger of uncritically accepting the secular narrative on society and of the place of religion in that society. We are so used to that narrative that it threatens to be simply an assumed part of our thinking. ‘Religion’ is private. You can believe what you want in the privacy of your own home (though the recent proposals in Scotland call even that into question, see yesterday’s post), but your ‘faith’ stays within the confines of your own personal life. It has no place in the public life of society, or your participation in it. Many Christians have already accepted this in principle. We sign contracts that restrict the public expression of our faith in terms of what we wear and don’t wear, what we say and don’t say, whether we pray or not; as Churches and Christian charities we accept funding that allow us to develop projects (sometimes even projects that we style as part of the Church’s ‘mission’) on the express condition that we don’t evangelise; we accept that certain behaviour and speech is not appropriate in schools and hospitals, prisons and even now on the internet. The real-terms erosion of freedom of speech (and action) in the UK is well documented and is often felt by Christians who are uneasy, but who are appeased by Christian leaders who tell us it’s OK really, and that we are still free to be Christians, and that demonstrating the love of Jesus is all we need to do, so let’s not worry about the fact we can no longer declare it. Social commentators have started speaking of ‘self-policing’: the idea that we learn that certain beliefs and convictions - shaped though they are by our commitment to Scripture - are not acceptable, and so we simply stop articulating them. It turns out that Christians are deeply Pavlovian.
In such a world, Church - the gathering of God’s people - is not ‘essential’. Therefore in a lock-down, ‘we’ allow private prayer, but not public worship… In the first wave of the pandemic, when pretty much everything was locked down, perhaps we could tolerate the Government’s banning of public worship. But in a situation where significant aspects of public gathering remain possible but responsible gathering for worship is banned, the lines are much more blurred. When can open our buildings for ‘services’ the Government consider essential (to run a foodbank, or a support group; to provide formal child care, or education), but not for public worship, even if that public worship is conducted within the guidelines previously laid down (use of face coverings, 2 meter-distancing, etc), then it is far from clear that ‘health’ is the only issue being taken into consideration. What’s going on when we can have a dozen people socially distanced in our buildings for a ‘support group’, but not for a prayer meeting, or a service of worship. Some gatherings are ‘essential’, but gathering for worship isn’t one of them, apparently.
It is unlikely that our Bishops will contest this. We painfully remember prominent Bishops encouraging us to civil disobedience by attending political rallies, whilst complying with Government guidance and shutting the Churches. My own sense of betrayal was acute. There is little reason at this stage to assume that those entrusted with our spiritual oversight will take a different course of action this month.
Nevertheless, the question remains: Is the public gathering for worship a necessary part of faithful dicispleship? Any cursory reading of the Bible would lead us to answer ‘Yes’, and to conclude that the loss of this is not something of marginal consequence. We saw in the recent ‘Standing Strong’ conference that the Church elsewhere in the world is bemused - astonished even - by the ease with which we have surrendered this privilege. Before we even begin to consider the legal questions, the spritual realities press in on us.
‘Church’ is the word usually used to translate ‘ekklesia’ in the New Testament. We are often told that it means ‘the people’, not ‘the building’. This simply isn’t true. ‘Ekklesia’ in fact means ‘assembly’ or ‘gathering’. Originally the word had a wider meaning than it usually does today, in that it could apply to political, religious, or indeed unofficial groups. Perhaps that is why Jesus and the Apostles used it. Church is the GATHERING of the people. You’ll have heard me often emphasising this in my preaching. Christianity is a public and corporate reality. It has self-evident personal implications, but it only becomes (exclusively) personal and private or even hidden in the most extreme of circumstances. Where the Church is so persecuted that faith must be secret, there is a deep sense of spiritual impoverishing that our brothers and sisters long to overcome. They will go to extraordinary lengths to meet with other Christians, even risking imprisonment and physical harm to do so. Granted, a building set apart to accomodate that gathering isn’t an essential part of the equation, but the idea has more merit than we are used to recognising.
And it is not simply a gathering for religious reasons. It is naive to think that Christianity isn’t a political reality. We’ll see this in our BRT breakfast in a couple of weeks. The Book of Acts presents the Church and the Gospel that gives rise to it in starkly political terms. Christ is ‘another King’ (Acts 17:7).
So… as we approach lockdown we have profound questions to navigate. Do we accept the Government’s assessment of the place of ‘religion’ in society? Do we accept the idea that my faith in Christ is a ‘personal and private’ part of who and what I am? What is our relatinship with civil authority? When some of us are prepared to engage in protest and (even civil disobedience) in other political and social causes, why are we silent on matters of Church and public worship? How do we see our relationship with ‘the Church’, the gathered people of God? Are some things more important than life and death? Just how important my place in the corporate worship of the living God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
These are no longer academic questions of little consequence. They are no longer the kind of questions we can safely discuss in Fellowship Groups, or over a coffee (or other beverage of choice). When I can take my child to school, but not to Church… when our buildings can be used ‘support groups but not corporate worship… these questions are moving out of the category of idle curiosity, and into the category of consequences. Perhaps we can bear the tensions for a month… but by all accounts this isn’t the last Lockdown we will face. What price will we be asked to pay? …and by whom?