372.
To be a member is to have no life, no being and no movement except through the spirit of the body and for the body. The separated member, no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has only a wasting and moribund being left...
But in loving the body it loves itself, because it has no being except in the body, through the body, and for the body...
We love ourselves because we are members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons [of the Trinity].
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For my part, let me settle on the point today that you can't be a Christian all by yourself. The heart of Christian praxis is the ecclesia, the "laboratory of love" to use my description from Reviving Old Scratch.
Of course, this message about the necessity of the church isn't going to be a welcome message. But truth be told, I picked Pascal's Pensées for Fridays precisely because I knew it wouldn't be popular.
I've been reading Alan Kreider's book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Among Kreider's points is that it was the ecclesia that drove the improbable rise of Christianity in the first three centuries of the church, the way the body of Christ cared for and loved each other, especially for the poor among them. Christianity simply is the church.
Listen, it's easy to sit in front of a screen and conclude that the church is dead. From the abuse scandals of the Catholic church to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast to evangelicals behaving badly pretty much everywhere. It's a train wreck and things look pretty grim and dire.
But here's my news, news that will never make the news. Because of what I get to do as an author and speaker, I've spent a lot of time in local churches. Most of them pretty small. And those churches just encourage the hell out of me. They inspire me. Why? Because those small, local churches are the repositories of the "patient ferment" of the ecclesia, the humble people who will never make a Twitter feed or podcast who are doing the daily, loyal work of caring for each other. Line the pastors up and have them share their stories and name the names. They have a list of heroes, the saints in their churches who are doing incredibly hard and beautiful things. All of it unseen and unknown. People you've never heard of. The church no one will ever hear of.
And so, here is my gentle, albeit unpopular, encouragement: Go to church.
