Tell me of a time that you lost or gained your faith in humanity and my prediction is that you lost it to an organisation and found it again in real flesh and blood people. Tell me I’m wrong—please! But, if I’m right, there are far fewer true misanthropes1 out there than there are people whose nerve endings are frayed pretending that organisations are or can be good representations of what it means to be healthy humans. When it comes to organisational Christianity we want to know what it looks like to have a healthy church! Well let’s get into it.
Take Me to Church | Part 1
In Which We Determine What We Mean by “Healthy”
IF YOU WENT TO THE DOCTOR with a broken leg and they told you that your real problem is that you need to fix your culture at home so that you don’t get broken legs, and refused to treat you, you might think about finding a new doctor. Likewise, if you visited your local psychologist with a significant history of trauma and they told you that your real problem is the way you chose to dress to come to their office and refused to treat you, you might think about finding a new psychologist.
You might laugh at the absurdity of being refused care by these physicians because you know that my examples are kind of silly. A good doctor doesn’t care how you broke your leg apart from the details that might tell them what they can expect to find when they x-ray your leg. A good psychologist might take one’s choice of clothing into account but the idea of turning someone away with complex trauma would be unthinkable to them.
The physicians in question know that whether the issue is in the mind, body or soul they must be aware of every relevant detail in order to effectively treat the acute areas of concern which their specialties uniquely qualify them to address. The medical world is a whole realm of flesh and blood humans who have devoted their lives to addressing all that ills the human body, soul and mind.
So when people ask about what makes a healthy church, we have to ask some qualifying questions. We could talk about the church’s culture or we could talk about how they dress, or about their history, their ethnic assortment or lack thereof. We could talk about safeguarding issues and their historical stances on key political and social issues in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries (depending on the age of the institution). But what I really want to know is who or what we are actually talking about?
The Church is the Church is the Church
When I was growing up in the 1990’s and early 2000’s we learned three things “stop, drop and roll,” “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” and “just say no”. In the Evangelical church we also learned that “the building is not the church”. An amazing piece of theological gold that on a quick google search can be attributed to anyone from Albert Einstein to Abraham Lincoln2. But what stood as an incredible slogan for a social campaign that highlighted everything from not needing to feel sad when a church building burnt down to getting people to think about evangelism rather than fighting about the colour of the sanctuary carpet, sadly never developed beyond a trite saying. It’s become vouge for hip Christians who grew up in the 90’s like I did to invoke OG Evangelical Industrial Complex slogans like WWJD—What Would Jesus Do, nodding meaningfully and acknowledging them as stunningly good theology for the late 1900’s
In the same way that people, apparently, used to think that the Church was just a building, somebody thought it was a good idea to remind people that the Church is a gathered people…but after their intended purpose for reminding us of this was fulfilled we then fell into the equally damning belief that the Church is a gathered people. The gathering became the hyperfocus that replaced the church building as a misdirection from acknowledging the Church as a people, gathered or otherwise. Excuse my overexpression but in effort for this not to be confusing: people are flesh and blood humans.
If you ever needed an explanation for why the old church confessions are so hyper specific, this is why. Meanings are very easily twisted by something as simple as changing the emphasis on a trite overwritten slogan. Time plus meaning often equals a change of emphasis and a loss of original intent. In our case, it only took a matter of 30-odd years for a simple sentence to go through at least three iterations of meaning.
The Church is a BuildingThe Church is a GatheringThe Church is a People
I don’t know if you know this, but people are messy. Thinking of the Church as a gathering allowed us to hyper-organise ourselves into sterile, controlled environments. Organisational language, theory and theology simply abounds when it comes to talking about the church. We translate biblical images of the church as a building or a body and read organisational language into it so much so that we argue over what makes a gathering a church and what makes a gathering not a church. Much of our conversations about church health revolve around these conversations.
It would be…ingenuine to say that the church is not a gathered people as we have theologically declared for generations. Church does translate to the assembly. The question we must ask then is not what is the church or how is a church organised but rather, who is it that is assembling? We have asked this question before—it’s not a new question but the way we have asked it in the past is: who fits in our organisational structures? The Organisation determines who is allowed to gather. The way we must now ask this question needs to be redirected towards the reality that gathering is largely inconsequential to the identity of the people who are coming together. The Church moves from being a gathered people to people who gather.
This still presents problems of understanding as people can still be understood as a term to denote a certain culture, way of life, or an ethnic, or economic group that is organised in a certain way for a certain purpose thus we are still stuck in a loop of thinking that strips the people of God of their proper identity in God. It is important to understand then, that Church is the new kid on the block of terms to describe us, only appearing late in the record in the book of Matthew3. We are first and foremost the people of God who have received mercy.4 This forces us to ask the question, who receives mercy? People receive mercy, and not people in an organised sense, but individuals—flesh and blood people. If we are primarily flesh and blood people who have received God’s mercy then any question of health must be directed towards flesh and blood people and not towards any notions of organisational health.
An organisation can be perfectly healthy and opporating at full output capacity and its fuel which it burns through at a great rate can still be people; these are not mutually exclusive realities. So when Christians come along who start to point out how the organisation is burning through people like there’s no tomorrow, the organisation has a healthy immune response to burn through those particular people like a virus. So…we did it! We achieved optimum organisational health and backed it up with scripture and solid theology and guess what? What we fortified over generations of academic and lay leader rigour is a parasite feeding off of the people of God who have received mercy. But God is not interested in crafting a way of life, or a culture or an economy all of which only exist secondarily to flesh and blood people whom God is reconciling to Godself. We must, therefore, love what God loves—flesh and blood people.
Concerning the Anthrohead
People, however are not just their bodies, though we have ignored our bodies for generations due to the mishandling of the Scriptures in many regards.5 We are, to my estimation, an Anthrohead, tripartite creature of soul and spirit contained in bodies which bear the image of our Creator. So…complicated beings. Bringing together complicated, messy beings at various stages of integration due to generations of ignoring one or the other of our three parts is a messy business. Organisations aren’t often bothered with the work of encouraging the integration of the bodies, souls and spirits of its individual members, regularly preaching against the sins of individualism and praising the virtues of collectivism—the ROI6 just isn’t worth it, the math isn’t mathing to spend organisational time and resources towards the integrated health of it’s individual members. So, we patch them up like a field hospital and send them back out to battle.
Sure, we have retreats that focus on our marriages and parenting and what it means to be a Godly man or woman but it always comes back to ignoring an individual’s integrated health so that they can get back out there and be a good wife, husband and church member. In so doing so, we teach that individuals have little to no meaning to us or God all by their lonesome; that the only people who matter are those who are grouped up and, ultimately, who group up with us in our organisation and add to our perceived safety, legitimacy and provision. It is my view that true health among the people of God is found first in the integration of an individual’s body, soul and spirit, and then in that individual’s integration into a fellowship of other well-integrated people.
Watch Your Language!
We speak very differently about the Soul, Spirit and Body. The Soul is saved, the Spirit renewed and formed, and the Body? Beaten, suppressed, dragged behind the bus, ignored, mostly, when we are not decrying the sins of the flesh. Oh, no—we desire spiritual formation above all else.
But streamlined spiritual formation is not enough. I know, it’s unfair; we don’t mean spirit when we say spiritual formation— we somehow mean all of the things we are supposed to become as Christians but the word is spiritual and words have exclusive meanings. We end up saying Spiritual Formation in a noxious, gnostic sense where the body is the cost of the formation of the soul and spirit. Because of our lack of specificity we engage in self-flagellating behaviours and worse in order to free the soul to become everything it was meant to be apart from the body. This practical heresy infects every part of our formation when we neglect the body for the sake of the soul and spirit. We love it when Paul decries his body of death and demands that we beat it into submission and when Jesus seems to call for the mangling of our bodies7 for the sake of our souls, we cry out, hallelujah! The stench of death is like a sweet aroma burnt on the sacrificial alter to Angry God—and he never supplies the ram.
In order to justify acts of terror wrought on the human body throughout history—the body has had to be vilified. Crushed, pressed and running over to fuel the secondary interfacial machine. I think of the Magdalene Laundry Houses and others run by the church who committed humanitarian atrocities in the name of Angry God; those Rapists who all the while claimed to be on the side of life; those worshipers of Satan who demonised the bodies of unmarried mothers; those Monsters who committed infanticide, who mocked their mothers as they gave birth alone in shrieking shacks; those Demons who when they had, had their fill of blood and screaming, repented of the sin of waste and sold their slave’s children to line their pockets and burnt the records to save their souls from being cast into Hell before their time. The blood boils in my veins and I cannot bear to keep them in mind. Is it any wonder women give up their children when the only reason this doesn’t happen anymore is because we’re not allowed by a world who has renounced the worship of Angry God.
Our individuality resides in our bodies, and if being an individual is a sin, as it is so often preached, then the body is where we hold that sin and so it must be supressed and lessened and bound to other bodies to redeem us of our individuality. We hate childlessness because two are better than one but less than three; it’s simple math. But we find no such demonisation of individuality in the scriptures. God does not inhabit groups of people like the hivemind of the Borg, enforcing assimilation—defying the futility of resistance—but rather each of us holds the full image of God within our bodies and so God dwells fully in each body; that is to say that God saves ours souls, renews our minds but dwells in each of our flesh and blood bodies.
3 Suggested Applications
A Healthy Christian is an Integrated Christian
Seeking the individual integration of your body, soul and spirit as one in your Anthrohead is the first step towards healthy community among the people of God. In this way, a healthy Christian community regards the meaningful redemption of all parts of the Anthrohead as equally dependant on one another rather than fuelled by the disintegration of one for the sake of the others.
What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander
When seeking healthy community you’re looking for consistency in message and practice. A healthy Christian community is united in love, faith and hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ. A community of integrated individuals will seek the integration not only of the individual to the community but of the recognition of other well integrated communities to make their members available and known to one another as the scriptures say.8 If a community is calling you to open up to their secret club run as fast as you can—they’re not just hiding something, their hiding everything.
Take Your Sweet Time—You’re Not in Imminent Danger Out Here
If you’re new to the wilderness and the thin air of the mountains in which you find yourself, take a deep breath and seek God where He can be found. The Scriptures attest to three sure places to find God: The Scriptures, Creation and People. People are likely the reason you’re out here, so it may take some time to see God again in them. As I said at the start it can be hard not to see people as the organisations they belong to, but as you learn to see things in their simplest forms the love will return for the people of God who have received mercy and along with it a renewed desire to seek out God in them in healthy well integrated communities which probably don’t look like your local church.
think Ebeneezer Scrooge; no love for humanity in the least as they believe them all to be as heartless as the institutions they belong to.
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Matthew 16:18 It is often attributed as being Jesus who first called us a capital C Church, when he says, “on this rock I will build my Church” but it could be better understood as, “around this standard or truth I will gather my people,” meaning, “my people are the ones who recognise me as the Christ” We may address this in later parts of this series.
Out of Hosea 2 and 1st Peter 2:10
Too many to name here and stay on topic.
Return On Investment
See: 1 Corinthians 3:21-23
I go into detail about this in Polity for the Least of These
More and more, I am departing from the tripartite idea of integration. What if we just are? Why do we need to identify each part of ourselves? I wonder if we can talk about human becomings instead if human beings as I mention in some of my writing. So are we body and soul and spirit? Or, we just are what we are without parts that make a whole, but a whole in and of itself. If so, salvation is not of the soul, but if humanity, our humanity. I don’t know, these are just some thoughts I have had, and you reminded me if them. Thanks!
"It is my view that true health among the people of God is found first in the integration of an individual’s body, soul and spirit, and then in that individual’s integration into a fellowship of other well-integrated people." Oh my gosh YES. This makes so much sense to me. This validates and affirms the journey I've been on. I just hate feeling like I'm crazy because most people in the organizational church just don't get this.