Defending the Community: The Discipline of Koinonia

Everyone is growing familiar with the statistics advertising the dissolution of Christianity in the United States, but we don’t need statistics to tell us what we plainly see: Christianity considered as “public,” as a binding social ethic across demographic boundaries in the United States, has disappeared. The situation was discernible already in the 1960s when the coming of age of the post-war generation (“Boomers”) increasingly meant departure from standard Christian practice and belief, and with the collapse of Christian institutions and the secularization of public discourse, “what it means to be a Christian” has now become, some half-century later, utterly definable by the individual and need not include any reference to traditional patterns of belief and practice. In such a public environment the devout adherent to tradition must be an outcast if not an enemy of good society.

It remains for those who wish to continue in the tradition of Christianity to come to a refreshed understanding of the meaning of old ideas like church, conversion, community, worship, sacrament, and discipleship. What we often find is not a shortage of good catechesis but rather a dearth of communal practice upon which catechesis can attach itself. Without a self-aware, animated, and therefore defined ecclesial social structure to enter into, a newly catechized convert or revert to the Church cannot make practical sense in his daily life of the Church’s teaching about what it means to be a Christian. Without a socially lived Christianity there is little power in an individually believed Christianity—a faith that cannot realize itself in a society (a circle of friends, a communion) remains a dead faith to the extent it remains at all. We are not called to be Christians by ourselves but with one another.

We who would persist in our dedication to traditional belief have now to ask ourselves with utmost seriousness whether we are dedicated to the tradition of Christian community, and if we think that “Christian community” means simply meeting our Mass obligations and otherwise spending some portion of our time with other Christians, even at Christian-themed events, even “in church,” then I must argue that our notion of what constitutes community in the properly Christian sense must be reevaluated.

For a Christian “community”—communion (the Greek word used in the New Testament is koinonia)—is a society of disciples of Christ, a social union under the discipline of the Gospel, which union essentially defines each member. If we remain aware that all the baptized are “the Body of Christ” in union with Christ the Head, we have grown complacent about the practical meaning of membership in the Body. In virtue of our baptism we are part of the “holy nation” and “kingdom of priests” (Ex 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9) who rightfully exercise a prophetic ministry of speaking into the community, a priestly ministry of mediating the Person of the Word (Christ) in the community, and a kingly ministry of governance in the community (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church 781-810). How the laity exercise this ministry certainly differs in some crucial ways from the clergy’s exercise of it, but the essence of the three-fold ministry of the member of the Church is the same for all because the source of that essence is the same—the Spirit of Christ.

This means two things: we must first and always begin with exercising the three-fold ministry of the Body upon ourselves, speaking the Gospel to ourselves, mediating Christ to ourselves in divine worship and prayer, and ruling ourselves according to the ethic of Christ in body and in mind. But we do not stop there, for we must exercise this ministry to one another as well. If to live as a disciple (student) is to live under a discipline (teaching), then as members of the community of disciples we must discipline one another. If we refuse the responsibility of living as a member of the community, then the community will be weaker because of our irresponsibility. A community characterized by the refusal of proper responsibility ceases to be fruitful. In fact, it ceases to function as a community at all. Where there is no functioning community, the newly evangelized have no place to live out their young faith, and the tiny flame of the Gospel which flickers so delicately and vulnerably in their hearts is snuffed out.

And so in ours. In an age in which the pervasive lack of Christian faith is put into stark relief by a comparison with the dominant secularized atmosphere in which Christianity lurks as a ghost in the deep background, confessing Christians have come to romanticize the doubt, unbelief, and moral despair that characterizes the post-Christian culture of the secular West. We look hard for evidence of the old faith in works of secular pop-culture and in secular artists and streams of thought. We point anxiously to the “bad Catholic” hiding in the back corner of the Sunday service, who slips in just before the Gospel and out just before the dismissal, avowing that he, too, is part of the Church. We bend over backwards to include the marginal or possible Christian in our ecclesial rhetoric and planning, trying with all of the charity and compassion we can muster to acknowledge that “he too is searching for God, she wants to make a place for God.”

Yet, in remembering the great truth that the Church is a “field hospital” and that the sacraments are not “prizes for the perfect” we can absolve ourselves of the responsibility to the great corresponding truth, that the purpose of the hospital is for healing of disease and maintenance of good health, and the purpose of the sacraments is for the perfection of the believer in faith, hope, and charity. By itself our commitment to inclusion does not constitute a “missional” stance. We often deceive ourselves into believing that we are “meeting people where they are” when what we do in practice amounts to a refusal to call them forward into the life of the community, into responsibility. A “call,” a “catechesis,” which does not open the door to an animated community is no true call at all, no true catechesis at all. Perhaps we know in our hearts that there is no functioning community to call them into, such that we have learned to be content with calling them “marginal,” or worse, we have functionally ceased to acknowledge that there is any such thing as “the margins” altogether. And with this redefinition of “community” the community has ceased to function as it should, as it must.

We must entertain an even darker possibility: the dysfunctionality of Christian communities is not simply a feature of an unbelieving society but a cause of it. The Christian traditionally understands himself as a person “on the way” (in via), as a “seeker” (quarens). In romanticizing the seeker, however, I fear we have inadvertently disconfirmed in him the possibility of finding and helped him make the status of “seeking” an end in itself, which is absurd. The “Lost Soul” is now a paradigm case in unbelieving society of the authentic person, the serious person, and it is not at all clear that most believing Christians, especially in our sophisticated cosmopolitan environments, understand themselves as having any “finding” to offer the one who by self-proclamation is seeking, is lost. How could we be confident in reaching out to the seeker when we lack so much confidence in reaching out to brothers and sisters in the community who are going astray? We do not want to be dogmatic in a haughty and self-congratulatory way and so we’ve decided not to be dogmatic at all. In the good commitment to “keep our noses out of other people’s business” we refuse to identify specific situations in which a brother or sister is harming the community, as well as themselves, by their words and actions. In desiring to avoid authoritarianism we have, as Christians, all too often abdicated our proper authority in the realm of the human spirit. We should be prepared to admit this to the extent it applies to ourselves: we fear to call others to a robust practice of Christianity to which we ourselves are not wholly committed, and thus we do not call others to a robust faith.

It is a salutary feature of our society, especially as it has gotten more pluralist with respect to creeds and religious practice, that we can separate the life lived in public from that lived in private. But this also means that we have relegated ever more and more to the private sphere aspects of life that are genuinely public, like marriage. We increasingly take it for granted that we can live out experimental marriages even prior to engagement as well as within engagement, and we are losing the ability to think of this as essentially damaging to the community as well as to the individuals who take such liberties.

Within our Christian communities this re-categorizing of public responsibility to private discretion has been disastrous for the young, whom we should be fortifying with good discipline in order to make them responsible adult members of the Body. When we no longer feel justified in restricting the administration of sacraments but think it is our obligation to offer them to anyone who asks, we have lost the sense of what is good for the community, for anyone who can simply proclaim on his or her own that they are a “part of the community” according to standards that they themselves set and of which they will brook no critique is simply claiming the right to undermine the community. But no one has any such right. A refusal of the community to resist the individual who will not submit to the discipline of the community amounts to a refusal to defend the community. Koinonia is broken for the rebellious member and damaged for all. In such a situation we’ve lost the sense of the community altogether. We’ve lost the sense of what it means to be “in the Church.” What is left, then, of our sense of being a Christian?

The ascendency of individually-defined Christianity means that we are not available for one another as priest, prophet, and king, and so the image of Christ is tarnished and blurred in us, often beyond all recognition. There should be little wonder, then, that to the extent this situation persists in our Church, the light of the Gospel does not shine in and through us out into the secular world. But without that light shining in the darkness, how will the seeker find his way?

So again, we must all begin and persist in being serious with ourselves about our selfishness and hubris, in fact, a pusillanimity with respect to our responsibility to the community. Whenever we sin, but certainly when we sin seriously and especially when we commit such sins habitually which are of a more public and social nature, we are harming the soul of the community as well as our own souls. Our moral authority is radically diminished in such situations, which is to say, we make ourselves incapable of exercising the ministry of prophet, priest, and king. For all of us, as Lent begins, this line of communal self-examination seems to me a quite proper and pressing matter for penance and reform of life.