My Little Heresy

Last night I was preparing my order of service for this Sunday’s Covenant Service. At the end I put down ‘Blessing, Dismissal’. It’s what I’ve written for years. This morning it doesn’t look too good in black and white. ‘Blessing’ – I have no problem with that. It’s that word ‘dismissal’. It makes it sound like church is over for another week, and that’s where I think I’ve slipped into heresy.

 

The trouble is, that is how we have conceived of church for far too long. It’s a certain wooden take on the Greek word that the New Testament translates as ‘church’, ekklesia. Ekklesia was the word used for the assembly. So the notion goes that church exists when we assemble together.

 

But I can’t see church that way any more. It has to be more. More literally ekklesia refers to those who have been ‘called out’ – it denotes the holy calling of God’s people. This calling doesn’t just exist for an hour or two on Sunday morning. It exists all the time. I rather like the notion of the Australian church leader James Thwaites in his book The Church Beyond The Congregation that Scripture has in view both the ‘church gathered’ and the ‘church dispersed’. When I say, ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ and the congregation replies, ‘In the name of Christ. Amen’, I am not dismissing church, I am commissioning church.

 

In the early nineties one of my ecumenical colleagues was a URC minister called Jeanne Ennals. I once took a service at ‘her’ church. She gave me a draft order of service. I remember she never called it the ‘dismissal’: It was a ‘word of mission’.

 

The challenge comes, then, in so reorientating our thinking as church leaders and the congregations we service to embrace church dispersed as well as church gathered, to move from dismissal to commission and mission. This little episode has been an uncomfortable reminder of how far my practice has to catch up with my theory.