What Kind of Church Are We? // Station Eleven & Community
There are clubs for terry cloth enthusiasts, secret orders involving lamb skin underwear, and weirdest of all, biological families. Communities come in all shapes and sizes.
And then there are churches, and within churches, a whole bunch of different kinds of churches.
So what kind are we?
I can think several ways to answer that. We can talk about our roots in the Church of God Restoration Movement. We can talk about being Protestant. We can go all the way back to the very early days of Church. But lately, for me, I've been helped by thinking about three fictional communities in the 2014 novel, Station Eleven.
The novel is set 20 years after a catastrophic pandemic wipes out 90% of humans. The story focuses on three main communities.
One is sealed off in an airport. They are hyper vigilant, overly cautious. They have solar energy and hydroponics, a school. The centerpiece of their community is the "Museum of Civilization," an homage of old electronics that no longer work.
Another community is made up almost entirely of children, all born after the pandemic. They are led by a charismatic prophet bent on burning down anything that resembles "the before." What keeps them together is the Prophet's charisma and a myth he reveres.
The third and primary community in the novel is called The Traveling Symphony.
It's an odd group.
They travel around Lake Michigan performing plays by Shakespeare set to music. It's only Shakespeare, because people wanted "the best of the past," but the sets, costumes, and music are all original.
The novel doesn't portray these three communities as all bad or entirely perfect, but the Traveling Symphony definitely is on to something. It's not the moderate group between the extremes; it's paradoxical. The group travels constantly, but is committed to its circuit around the lake. They are always guests and travelers, but they are also the ones serving and giving gifts. Their main role is impractical -- literally "play" -- but they do it with utmost discipline.
Is there a picture of Church here? I think so.
1. Churches are sometimes in love with their own past. They become museums of Christianity, accumulating relics, assuming people just can't wait to get inside to see it all. Others become militantly focused on what's "new" and "young" -- moving fast and breaking things, relying on charisma and novelty.
2. Church-as-Traveling-Symphony (CaTS? Nah.) takes something old -- the Gospel -- and performs it for its neighbors. The story of God is reenacted as believers practice forgiveness, keep promises, and do good to enemies.
3. In this picture, we are strangers deeply committed to our places. It's not about letting everyone know how lucky they are to visit us. It's about being disciplined and joyful, devoted pilgrims, serving the world.
4. We move but we move slow. When we fix things, we use gold. We are carefully, playfully renewing and being renewed by the margins.
There are loads of real life examples of what I'm talking about. Perhaps my favorite: the church in Le Chambon, France during World War II.
But the reason the Traveling Symphony resonates so deeply with me is because it reminds me of Peak. We don't cling to relics, and we don't obsess over what's new. We're a community learning to slow down and repair. To love the Gospel enough to live it. A community odd, paradoxical, and truly wonderful -- in other words, a church.
