In his lectures, George Grant has recently been highlighting the remarkable work of Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish theologian and preacher of the last century. At the center of that work was the concept of “parish.”
We frequently start our discussions at the wrong end. Say for example that we bring up the issue of the relation of the Church to the world. In doing this, we think first about the whole Church and the abstract world. We rarely bring our thoughts down to the level of particular congregations and particular communities surrounding them. The result of this mistake is that we find ourselves trafficking in abstractions.
The church is not the parish, and the parish is not the church. At the same time, the church thrives at the center of the parish, informing and discipling those who live their lives in the parish. Life in the church involves word and sacraments while life in the parish involves auto mechanics, farming, retail shops, schools, along with all the other stuff men and women do.
But the denominational system, as it has developed in America, has greatly undermined our capacity even to think in terms of parish, which in turn means that we have lost even the concept of true community. The closest approximation we have of it is found in good churches where the members of the congregation worship together, love each other, and share the occasional potluck. This is good as far as it goes, but it must be acknowledged in all honesty that it does not go very far. We have truncated our churches, and have detached them from the soil. We will drive by thirty churches in order to attend the one we like. Whatever advantages this has (and there are some), it still means that churches are selected in a way that is inconsistent with the formation of true community. In an average town of modest size, the Christians in that town will arise on the Lord’s Day, and then as they make their way in scores of different directions to multiple churches, they perform an ecclesiastical version of a Chinese fire drill. Perhaps such expressions are too insensitive to be legal anymore, but if so, the crackerjack legal team at Ligonier will certainly take it out.
But in the older parish system, the members of the congregation would certainly worship together on the Lord’s Day, just as we do. But for the rest of the week, they would labor together in the fields, fish together on the seas, work in the same shops, go to war together in the same regiment. Their lives were intertwined — but their intertwined lives were also ordered. They had a hierarchy of values, and the centerpiece of their lives was the worship of God.
All this affects how we think about the Great Commission. Too often we are too quick to dash off to an evangelistic field which is exciting, fruitful, distant. How many churches think seriously of their duty to fulfill the Great Commission in their neighborhood? And even when we think “locally,” it is too easy to think about establishing a “ministry” in a town with a sufficient population to provide the new church with its “market share.” Thus we are selective in our local ministry. In order for this system to work we cater to our market niche. The church functions on exactly the same principles as a new department store. This also mitigates against true community. Community will never arise from groups with “special interests,” whether those interests include ham radio, square dancing, or the five points of Calvinism.
The problem is deep and systemic, and there are no quick fixes. But one place to begin is to think seriously about where we live. At least two criteria should be considered — living near the church, and living near one another. Christians should love one another, not just on the Lord’s Day, and loving one another involves wanting to be together. This involves wanting to create opportunities for our children to play together, for our men to work together in various “barn raising” tasks, for the women to be involved in one another’s lives on a daily basis.
Before all this is dismissed as an agrarian utopia, unfit for the demands of modern city living, it should be noted that Thomas Chalmers was successful in establishing coherent parish communities in urban centers. The issues here do not concern what is possible, but rather what we want. For all our longing for “community,” when it comes down to the point, we sometimes discover that we love our loneliness.
To whatever extent we decide to pursue the parish ideal, the modern world knows how to defend itself. When people start loving one another, and seeking to live close to one another, they clearly belong to a “cult,” and will probably end up drinking funny-tasting Kool Aid. A cult mentality is “obviously” exhibited by anyone who does not want to live in the prescribed atomistic and detached way — just another ball bearing rattling around in modernity’s machine. The contemporary standards will beckon with a siren call — any kind of weirdness is accepted by us, as long as it is not the weirdness of normality and sanity. But it is time for Christians to think about turning away.
The modern world is a big place, and will not be transformed in any fifteen minute processes. But if we are thinking about our grandchildren, a good place to start our thoughts is with the idea of parish.