by Johnny Zokovitch
This past weekend, I facilitated my first all-church assembly with the small Catholic community for which I serve in pastoral leadership. The focus of the assembly was to revisit the question, “What does it mean to be church?”
It really was a “revisiting” of that question because this is a community that has, over the course of many decades, periodically discussed and then defined for itself what it means to be church. It is one of those characteristics that drew me to this community in the first place, this wrestling to define identity. One of my colleagues on staff, when I proposed this avenue of exploration as the subject of our assembly, affirmed that questions such as these which are foundational and go to our common sense of mission need to periodically be re-engaged – with new people in new times and in the light of new needs.
Fortunately, the gospel two Sundays past had given us a point of scriptural reflection. It was Matthew’s story set at the wall of rock at Caesarea Philippi where Jesus tells Peter that “upon this rock, I will build my church.” But of course, as our homilist shared at that Mass, “church” wasn’t the word that Jesus used: it was ekklesia, which later came to be understood as “church” but literally means “the called out ones.”
This idea about being a people called out is a common biblical theme. In the Exodus story, God calls the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, calling them out to be “a people peculiarly God’s own” (Deuteronomy 7:6).
This sense of the church being a community of the “called out” has, in its DNA, the mandate to stand in contrast to the society and culture which surrounds it. Richard McBrien, in his monumental undertaking Catholicism, begins by quoting the theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, in addressing this idea of a witness of contrast:
“The essence of the Church, therefore, ‘consists in this: that the final goal of grace achieved by Christ becomes visibly present in the whole Church as a visible society’ (Schillebeeckx). The Church is not only a means of salvation; it is the principal sign, or sacrament, of salvation. The important missionary implication is not whether the whole world enters the Church but whether the Church itself gives credible witness to the presence of Christ and of God within the community.” (emphasis mine)
This understanding of witness is rooted in the life, mission and death of Jesus, as well as the early Christian community, both of which suffered for the pronounced differences between their values and the values of their societies, in particular the dominant values of the ruling classes (political, religious and economic). I have always thought that another way of saying this was captured well by the writer Flannery O’Connor: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”
In a country that detains and deports our immigrant brothers and sisters, our churches should offer a visible and striking contrast with such inhuman policies. In a country that embraces violence as a viable answer for resolving conflict, again, the people who make up the church should cultivate ways that sharply depart from the conventional belief in employing violence to serve one’s ends. The same is true for nationalism, racism, materialism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and a host of other illnesses parading as values, most often by people who identify as Christians. For those of us in the United States especially, this understanding of the church as an alternate society – or even alternate reality – that by its very presence and life critique the larger culture should be a given, inherent to who we are and what we understand church to be.
The God of Exodus and the prophets has called us out. The Jesus of Scripture and the early discipleship community have shown us what it means to live as those who are called out – not those who accommodate to the values of the dominant culture.
Every church should be embracing this tension today and exploring what it means to be “a credible witness to the presence of Christ” in these times.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/ and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.