THE SHAPE OF GOD'S BODY - Christianity Today

The first time I attended LaSalle Street Church in inner-city Chicago, I sat behind a middle-aged black woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter. When we stood to sing, the girl turned around and grinned at those of us in the pew behind her. We smiled back politely, and she continued grinning and staring at us. She acted strange, even retarded. Then on the fourth stanza of the hymn, she bent over, grabbed the hem of her skirt, and lifted it over her head, exposing herself.

Welcome to church.

Over the next few years, we learned to count on the unexpected. One Sunday a man aimed a football, a perfect spiral pass, at the pastor who was standing at the altar praying over a full tray of Communion glasses.

Another time, a street woman wrapped in many skirts wandered to the platform during the sermon, genuflected, and started talking aloud to the pastor.

A more hostile man called down curses on the pastoral staff during the congregation’s spontaneous “Prayers of the People”: “God, burn down their houses this week!”

A downtown church that does not turn away the poor, the homeless, or the unpredictable, risks attracting people who may disrupt the services. Although the barely controlled chaos took some getting used to, I learned that God is as present here as in the well-orchestrated suburban churches I had come from.

I think of urban churches like LaSalle Street whenever I read Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth. There, too, a spirit of barely controlled chaos reigned. The letters spell out the makeup of the congregation: Jewish merchants, gypsies, Greeks, prostitutes, pagan idolaters. No other New Testament books reveal such violent swings in tone. Paul battled church schisms, exploded at a report of incest, and fought to keep the Lord’s Supper from turning into a free-for-all. Corinth makes my church seem positively boring.

Most scholars believe 1 Corinthians predates virtually every other book in the New Testament. Paul may have written it just two decades after Christ’s resurrection, around A.D. 50-55. The first few chapters show him struggling with a basic question: “Just what is this thing called ‘church’?” Paul had never asked such questions about Judaism; culture, religious heritage, race, and even physical characteristics of worshipers clearly established the identity of that religion. But what was a Christian? What should a church look like? The answer must have seemed elusive indeed in the unruly context of Corinth.

Paul’s hesitation comes through in the way he gropes for words. You are God’s field, he says in chapter 3, and explores that metaphor for awhile. I, Paul, am a servant-no, better, I’m like a farmer who plants while another person waters. But, really, we’re both God’s fellow-workers.

Let’s try another metaphor, he continues. You are God’s building. Yes, exactly. I lay the foundation, and someone else adds the next layer. Better yet, you’re a temple, a building for God. Think about that: God living in you, his sacred building.

Field, building, temple-make up your mind, Paul, I think to myself as I read through his string of metaphors. He continues in such a vein throughout the book until finally, in chapter 12, he latches onto the metaphor of the church as God’s body. The book changes tone at that point, its style elevated from that of personal letter to the magnificent literature of chapter 13.

I think we have, in 1 Corinthians, a record of Paul thinking out loud, trying out different ways of describing this thing called a church. Each metaphor casts a different light on the subject, and the last one, the body, seems the most accurate description of all. Paul spends a whole chapter exploring physiological parallels, and his other letters return to that same modern metaphor of body more than two dozen times.

I identify with these chapters because of my own occupation as a writer. I often go through a similar procedure of searching for precisely the right word or metaphor: experimenting with this one, discarding that one, trying to force one, and then, ahh, the fine sense of relief that comes with locating the word or phrase that truly fits.

And yet, because of the nineteen hundred years that have elapsed, not all the metaphors Paul used to describe Corinth fit so well today. The truths they point to have not changed, but the readers have changed. Consider the illustrations from farming. Every Corinthian knew what they meant, for farms and vineyards surrounded their city and they bought their produce from farmers at a local bazaar. But from most U.S. cities you must travel at least thirty miles to see a respectable farm, and food comes scrubbed and shrink-wrapped on the shelves of a grocery store.

The building metaphor has the same problem. In Corinth you could buy a load of blocks and lay out a foundation with no more skill than the ability to dig a ditch and follow a straight line. Now you need building permits, jackhammers, earth movers, forms assemblers, concrete contractors (with union cards, please), and a general contractor to supervise it all. Somewhere in all the specialization, the force of the metaphor dissipates. As for Paul’s reference to temples, who builds temples anymore?

What would Paul, the master of metaphor, say in 1 Corinthians 3 if he wrote it today-if he were writing, say, to LaSalle Street Church in downtown Chicago, or First Presbyterian Church in Spokane, Washington, or St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Georgia?

I do not intend to speculate on what Paul would write, but I have let my mind roam over what exists in my neighborhood, searching for some metaphors that might apply to the church. I have asked myself, What is the church supposed to be, anyway? What should it look like?

God’s Driver’s License Bureau

I find it easy to spend most of my time around people very much like me. For the most part my friends resemble me in education, age, and values. They drive similar cars and have similar interests.

Intellectually, I know about the various ethnic groups around me-a million Poles in Chicago, and even more Hispanics, for example-but I rarely run into them. (I tried shopping in a Hispanic grocery store, but got hopelessly lost in the two long aisles devoted to different varieties of beans.)

Every three years, however, I get a notice ordering me to report to the Driver’s License Bureau to renew my license. Sometimes I have to take a written test, sometimes merely fill out a form and pose for a photo. But each time I must spend at least an hour standing in line, surrounded by a cross section of Chicago. That hour proves most educational.

So many overweight people in the world! Why are most of my friends on the skinny side? I ask myself. Where do all these obese people live? Who are their friends?

And so many senior citizens! I have read about the graying of America in Time magazine but, again, I have few regular contacts with people outside my age range.

I encounter the ethnic mix of Chicago directly, for it is the main reason I must spend an hour in line. Instructions are shouted, over and over, in simple English, to bewildered men and women.

I am amazed at how many people wear blue jeans each day, and at how many have not yet discovered deodorant, and how many had no access to an orthodontist when growing up. This is the real world here in the lobby of the Driver’s License Bureau.

My reactions may primarily reveal my own shelteredness, but I suspect all of us, by nature, gravitate toward people like us and rarely step outside that circle unless something forces us to-like an order to report to the Driver’s License Bureau. Or, unless we meet such people at church. And that is what I like best about the church I now attend: Diversity abounds, which consequently provides an outlook on the world I get in no other way.

I think back fondly on two people in the church of my childhood in Atlanta, Georgia-people I took turns sitting with when my mother was off teaching Sunday school. I loved sitting with Mrs. Payton because she wore animals around her neck. She had a stole, a garish bit of frippery that consisted of two minks biting each other’s tails. All during the service I would play with the hard, shiny eyes, the sharp, pointed teeth, and the soft skin and floppy tails of those magical animals.

Mr. Ponce wore no animals around his neck, but I knew no kinder person anywhere. He had six children of his own, and he seemed happy only when a child was sitting in his lap. He was a huge man, and I could sit there contentedly for an entire service without his leg falling asleep. He praised the pictures I drew on the church bulletin, and drew funny faces in my hands that would smile and wink when I moved my hands a certain way.

I remember Mr. Ponce for his kindness, and also for an enormous sprout of nasal hair that gave me endless fascination. If you asked me whom I liked best, Mrs. Payton or Mr. Ponce, I would have a hard time answering, but probably Mr. Ponce would get the edge. My own father died when I was only a year old, and Mr. Ponce provided for me an important male presence.

Later, when I grew older and more sophisticated, I learned the facts of Mrs. Payton and Mr. Ponce. Mrs. Payton was rich-that explained the animals around her neck. Her husband owned a successful Cadillac dealership. Mr. Ponce drove a garbage truck. He barely brought in enough money to support his large family. And, older and more sophisticated, I realized to my shame that as an adult I probably would not have befriended Mr. Ponce. Talking to him might have been awkward; we might have run out of things to discuss. We probably wouldn’t have had the same tastes or interests.

I am glad, very glad, that the church of Jesus Christ in my childhood included both Mrs. Payton and Mr. Ponce. I now see that the church should be an environment where both Mrs. Payton of the hairy stole and Mr. Ponce of the hairy nose feel equally welcome. I should not have to wait every three years for my trip to the Driver’s License Bureau for a reminder of what the real world is like.

Paul said the same thing to another congregation, in Colossae, “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (3:11).

God’s Emergi-Center

You’ve seen these latest mutants of the health care industry sprouting up in residential areas, in city storefronts, in sites as convenient as a 7-Eleven store. They go by different names, but in essence they are hospital emergency rooms without the hospital. Now, instead of driving five miles to a hospital to fill out six forms in triplicate and wait in a crowded lobby for an hour while accident victims break in line ahead of you, you can drive to an Emergi-Center and have a finger stitched, a swollen ankle examined, or a stomachache diagnosed.

I like to think of the church as one of those Emergi-Centers: open long hours, convenient to get to, willing to serve the needs of people who drop in with unexpected emergencies.

I must confess, I used to bristle when I heard someone accuse Christianity of being a “crutch” religion, a faith to attract the poor and the crippled and those who couldn’t quite make it on their own. But the more I read the Gospels and the Prophets, the more willingly I admit to a “crutch” faith. Those who make such disdainful comments about Christianity are usually self-confident, successful overachievers who have made it by looking out for number one, without asking anyone for help.

Frankly, the Gospel has little to offer people who refuse to admit need. Repentance requires me to come before God and admit that he, not I, is best qualified to tell me how to live. (Perhaps for this reason Jesus singled out the wealthy as the group least likely to enter the kingdom of heaven.) Actually, though, self-confident overachievers make up a very small proportion of this sad, pain-filled world of ours.

If I pause and think just of the people in my neighborhood, I encounter a whole catalog of human needs: a family devastated by a brain-damaged child, a young woman’s messy affair and divorce, a homosexual’s promiscuity, a case of terminal cancer, a sudden loss of job. Those needs have reached the crisis level; every one of us struggles against the normal human condition of loneliness, pride, occasional depression, fear, alienation. Where can we take our minor scrapes and bruises, and our major fractures and gaping psychic wounds?

We can go to the church. As I read the letters to the Corinthians again, I note they contain in addition to the strong language some of Paul’s most intimate words of loving concern. I have a hunch that Paul prayed more and fussed more over that church than he did over some of the more stable congregations he left around the Mediterranean rim. Corinth was an Emergi-Center kind of church, and Paul wanted it to succeed precisely because the odds were stacked against such a cantankerous group.

As I think through the history of the church, I view with shame and sadness much that has happened in the name of Jesus Christ: inquisitions, Crusades, racial pogroms, abuse of resources. Yet in this one area-binding human wounds-the church has done something right. In the major cities of the U.S., the names of the largest hospitals very often include a word like Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist, or the name of a Catholic saint. Although many of those hospitals are no longer overtly religious, they began as a mission of a church that saw a need to reach out tangibly to a hurting world.

Overseas, the trend is even clearer. In a country like India, where only 3 percent of the population call themselves Christian, 27 percent of the health care is provided by Christians. Ask an Indian to describe a Christian, and he or she may well describe someone who saved the life of their child, or treated a member of their family. To give one example, in the research and treatment of a disease like leprosy, most of the major advances came through Christian missionaries. Why? For a time, only they were willing to devote their lives to work among the victims of leprosy.

We cannot all be doctors and nurses, and technologically advanced countries are taking care of health needs in other ways (such as Emergi-Centers). But some human needs are best met in a loving community of people with diverse gifts.

I saw this process at work in a suburban church I attended before moving to Chicago. It was a small church, not particularly distinctive-to most people just a pleasant building to drive by. But to one person, Deborah Bates, that church served as a full-purpose Emergi-Center.

Deborah’s husband left her with four children, a deteriorating house, and very little child support. He left her for another woman, and for many months Deborah turned to members of the church for shoulders to cry on as she tried to cope with her own feelings of guilt and rejection. She had practical needs too: a leaky roof, plugged-up sewer drains, a rattletrap car. Deborah required long-term care. I can think of twenty individuals from that small congregation who spent time painting, baby-sitting, doing house and car repairs.

One man hired her and trained her in a new career. A wealthy woman offered to pay for her children’s education. For at least five years Deborah was propped up by the “crutch” provided by members of the church.

I imagine the motley church at Corinth often had to function as an Emergi-Center, and in fact Paul tells us of one person who was healed in the church. Paul expresses shock and outrage at a man involved with his stepmother, “a kind [of immorality] that does not occur even among pagans!” Paul was ready to hand the man over to Satan. But that same man, many scholars believe, makes an appearance in 2 Corinthians 2. The church had “treated” him, and was now ready to forgive and welcome him back into the fold. The emergency treatment had proven effective.

God’s CTA Train

This particular metaphor has meaning only for me, so I must quickly explain it. Several years ago I began taking literature courses at the University of Chicago, at the extreme south end of the city. To get there, I rode a Chicago Transit Authority train some eighty-five blocks, then transferred to a local bus.

The train ride offered a complete cross-section tour of Chicago. Where I caught the train, English was often drowned out by Spanish or Greek or Polish. As we headed toward Chicago’s downtown Loop area, well-dressed Yuppies predominated. Both those groups, ethnics and Yuppies, got off before we reached the South Side. There, I saw only black faces as the train threaded its way through middle-class, then lower-class, and then combat-zone areas of the city.

I started noticing the churches out of the train window. Catholic churches dotted the ethnic areas, mini-cathedrals built in the European style, with domes and bell towers. The black areas had mostly storefront churches with exotic names: Beulah Land Today Missionary Church, Holy Spirit of Brotherhood Church, Water in the Rock Baptist. And finally, as we approached the University of Chicago, I could see the magnificent Gothic cathedral built by the Rockefellers.

On campus, I spent my time studying such writers as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Soren Kierkegaard, John Donne, and the Japanese Christian novelist Shusako Endo. After class, I would leave those imposing grey stone buildings and retrace my journey, starting this time in the slums and working my way back through the mosaic of neighborhoods.

Again and again I was struck with the enormous breadth of the church. It has contained within it minds like John Milton and John Donne, and Leo Tolstoy and T. S. Eliot, yet the gospel was entrusted, primarily, to simple peasants. Very likely, some of the early church leaders could not read or write. Jesus himself left nothing in writing for us to study.

The journey to and from the University on the CTA train symbolized for me two aspects of the church, and my need to learn from both. From Water in the Rock Baptist, I learn simple beauty-the humility and an eagerness to embrace the Spirit, the actual Spirit of God who is alive on this earth. And I also learn the mystery that an author like Kierkegaard or Endo represents, the awareness that none of us has fully figured out the message of the Cross or of God’s grace.

On God’s CTA train, the poor and the rich, the simple and the profound, and often unlikely companions rumble along together.

“God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong,” Paul told the Corinthians (1:27). Yes, and he also chose a few individuals like the apostle Paul, but even his daunting intellect proved no match for the reality of an encounter with God himself. The church, God’s church, is big enough, and small enough, to exalt the humble and humble the exalted.

God’s Locker Room

For most of the year, I win the battle against TV addiction. We have not replaced our sixteen-inch black-and-white set mainly because its terrible reception (three images of everything, fuzzy bands across the top and bottom) forces us to limit our viewing to programs we desperately want to watch. But each year, around the end of March, a mysterious force draws me toward the rite of spring known as the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.

No one should have to endure the pressure placed on those young athletes. At the age of nineteen or twenty, they perform before thirty million television viewers with the entire weight of the university, state, and their professional careers riding on every rebound. Somehow the crucial game always manages to tighten up in the last few minutes, and the season reduces to a few shots, usually free throws.

A young man approaches the free throw-line and bounces the ball nervously. At the last possible second, to rattle him, the opposing team calls time out.

For the next two minutes the free-throw shooter squats on the sidelines, listening to his coach, trying not to think about what all twenty thousand fans are screaming about: his upcoming shot. He has shot one hundred thousand practice free throws over the season, most of them falling in. But this one is different. If he makes it, he will be the hero of all heroes on his campus. If he fails, how can he face his teammates again? How can he face life? He returns to the free-throw line, his jaw clenched, his muscles taut, the tension of a whole career etched in the lines of his face.

Freeze that image at the free-throw line, and advance the videotape to a scene that appears two minutes later. You see the same young man, but this time standing, or rather jumping up and down, in the locker room. Champagne streaks his hair. His smile is so wide you wonder why the skin does not split apart. He is sweatily hugging his coach, his teammates, the team manager, the dean, everyone. He made the shot!

Those two contrasting images symbolize for me the difference between law and grace. Under law, my destiny rides on everything that I do. To please the crowd, the coach, the pro scouts-to please God-I have to make the shot. I can’t miss. If I miss, it will sear me forever. I have to make it. I can’t sin.

But where sin abounds, said Paul, grace much more abounds. According to the gospel, the outcome of the game has already been determined, and we are on the winning side. Thus church is not one more place for me to compete and get a performance rating. Like a victorious locker room, church is a place to exult, to give thanks, to celebrate the great news that all is forgiven, that God is love, that victory is certain.

One Final Metaphor

As I let my mind roam over various metaphors to describe the church today, I find so many possibilities. The church is God’s family, a place where acceptance is based not on looks or intelligence, but on spiritual heredity, a heredity granted to us by God’s own Son.

The church is God’s welfare office, an institution set up to heal the blind, set free the captive, feed the hungry, and bring Good News to the poor-the original mandate Jesus proclaimed.

The church is God’s theater, a gathering which, as Kierkegaard noted, reverses the normal roles of performance: In church, the congregation performs and the pastor prompts, with God himself as the audience for our worship.

The church is God’s neighborhood bar, a hangout for people who know all about your lousy boss, your mother with heart trouble back in North Carolina, and the teenager who won’t do what you tell him; a place where you can unwind, spill your life story, and get a sympathetic arm around your shoulder, not a self-righteous leer.

Yet after trying out numerous metaphors, I found myself returning time after time to the one Paul settled on as most accurate and appropriate: the church as Christ’s body. First Corinthians 12-14 adumbrates the themes that will appear in the later epistles. “The body is a unit,” Paul says, “though it is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, they form one body” (12:12).

The body holds together in perfect balance the polar forces of unity and diversity. The church comprises people of all shapes and sizes who nevertheless are made one in Christ Jesus.

I dare not start in on all the analogies that flow from that one sentence, for already I have written two books in collaboration with a medical doctor in order to explore the meaning of the metaphor. But to me the greatest lesson from the body is this: We, you and I, form the primary representation of God’s presence in the world. What is God like? Where does he live? How can the world get to know him? His Presence no longer dwells in a tabernacle in the Sinai, or in a temple in Jerusalem. He has chosen, instead, to dwell in ordinary, even ornery, people like you and me.

I look around me on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, and I see the “risk” that God has assumed. For whatever reason, he now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that is LaSalle Street Church, and every other such gathering under his name.

That is our calling in this confused and confusing world: to share in the representation of what God is like. The apostle Paul never seemed to get over the shock of that metaphor. He took the mundane issues at Corinth so seriously because he believed they reflected not only on Corinth, but on God. For the watching world, we ourselves serve proof that God is alive. We form the visible shape of what he is like.

When I look at that shape around me, I easily get discouraged. We form such a poor image of what God is like. And yet when I turn to a book like 1 Corinthians, I feel a sudden gust of hope. To whom was Paul writing those soaring words of chapters 12-14? To that motley group of earthy Corinthians-idolaters, adulterers, and the like.

By their nature, metaphors have the power to inspire pride in what we are, while also spurring us on toward an ideal of what we should be. I can see why Paul relied on them so much. No church I know today totally fulfills the promise of the metaphors I have mentioned here. And yet every church represents that promise and offers a whisper of hope. We all reveal some aspect of the shape of God’s body.

Philip Yancey is editor at large of Leadership.