What is Church?

On Sunday mornings, as I head off to church, a weekly ritual, it is sometimes good to remind myself what church is (and isn't). Here are some thoughts about church from The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris.

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A student once asked Kathleen Norris how she could stand to go to church - there are so many hypocrites there.

Kathleen replied: "The only hypocrite I need to worry about on Sunday morning is myself."

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"... Christian worship is not, in the words of Margaret Miles, 'primarily a gathering of the like-minded' but a gathering of people 'to be with one another in the acknowledgement that human existence originates in and is drawn towards love.'

"Even when I find church boring, I try to hold this in mind as a possibility: like all the other fools who have dragged themselves to church on Sunday morning, including the pastor, I am there because I need to be reminded that love can be at the center of all things, if we will only keep it there..."

"... Cecil Williams, the pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco,... insists that 'the church is not just for believers.' In his book..., No Hiding Place, he says, simply, 'When people come to Glide, we don't ask them if they are atheists, Methodists, or Buddhists. We ask them what their names are and how they are doing.'"

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".. This is why St. Augustine is so precious to me. He helps me see, in the lengthy story of his own conversion - with its fits and starts, its meanderings and its deep desire for faith - that mine has been a traditional Christian journey. When I'm in church... I often think of the Augustines in our midst, who are still wandering in and out of the faith. I think of my own inconstancy in prayer, my own hypocrisies that I know by now are among the reasons I go to church: to burn them off in singing hymns, and in listening and responding to scripture."