The church is a caravan. It travels in company. In one of his sermons on the nature of Christ, Saint Augustine pictures the church as being in motion. The church“which is now traveling on its journey,” he observes, “is joined to that heavenly Church where we have the angels as our fellow citizens.” Augustine is saying this not only of the saints in heaven but also of those on earth. His view was one that saw the whole church, not only across the globe but across time. Or as he put it, “from Abel the just to the end of the world.” [1]
This is not what I usually see when the congregation assembles. When I look around the church, I see the faces of strangers mixed with a handful of friends. I do not see angels. Neither do I see the “great cloud of witnesses” that both Scripture and Augustine say accompanies the church on its journey (cf. Heb. 12:1).
This vision of the church that Augustine describes is one that Robert Markus, a scholar of early Christian studies, says was typical of ancient Christianity. “So close were the angels at the community’s prayer,” Markus writes, “that monks were told to turn aside if they needed to spit, lest they spit upon the angels gathered in front of them.” Markus explains that their sense was one of living “in perpetual proximity, even intimacy” with the entire community of faith. “The saints were God’s friends, but they also remained men’s kin,” Markus explains. “Together with them, the whole community was in God’s presence.”[2] To quote Paul Simon, these ancient Christians seem to have seen “angels in the architecture.’
There is nothing especially strange about such a view. It is a reflection of the Bible’s teaching by another Paul, who taught that those who are in Christ are fellow citizens with God’s people and members of his household. They are already seated in the heavenly realms (Eph. 2:6, 19). And yet, at the same time, they are waiting for “the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Likewise, the writer of the book of Hebrews describes the church as a band of pilgrims that does not now have “an enduring city” but is “looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).
When I read these words in Scripture, I can’t help but notice how drab my view of the same spiritual landscape is by comparison. I wonder why my church seems to be so different from theirs. But I think I know the answer. It’s because I lack of imagination. “The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world–if only from time to time,” Annie Dillard writes.[3] This is also the trick of faith. Both require the use of imagination.
You might think that imagination would be antithetical both to reason and to faith. We view reason as a realm of facts, while we think of the imagined as something “made-up.” Imagination, for most us, is a matter of fantasy instead of reality. Faith also seems to us to be inconsistent with imagination. Faith, for the Christian, is a realm of truth. It is a conviction about what God has said is true.
Yet faith, imagination, and reality are intimately connected. Those who look at the world through the eyes of faith must train their vision to perceive reality as the Scriptures define it. “A Christian does not simply ‘believe’ certain propositions about God; he learns to attend to reality through them,” theologian Stanley Hauerwas explains. “This learning requires training our attention by constantly juxtaposing our experience with our vision.”[4]
The seeing that Hauerwas writes about sounds difficult. Indeed, it is, especially if this particular kind of vision is called faith. Faith, we are told in Scripture, is a gift (Eph. 2:8). When Peter made his great confession that Jesus was both Messiah and the Son of the Living God, Christ did not compliment him for his insight. Instead, he declared that Peter was “blessed” because this conviction was not an insight from common sense or even a result of careful, rational analysis. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,” Jesus said, “for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” (Matt. 16:17). Faith is indeed a kind of vision, but it is not ordinary sight. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).
Using the imagination often involves the temporary suspension of disbelief. Those who exercise their imagination train their attention on a possibility that they had not previously considered. It may even be one that they initially thought was impossible. Pausing to ask“what if” opens their eyes to a different way of seeing. Faith, however, calls us to take another step, moving from the consideration of what might be to a conviction about what is.
As Hauerwas puts it, faith is a mode of attention that has been trained by the truth to view things as God sees them. It is not, however, an exercise in magical thinking. The Bible portrays it as the opposite. It is God’s Spirit working through the truth to open our eyes to reality, just as God opened the eyes of the prophet’s servant to see the hills filled with the horses and chariots of fire that surrounded Elisha (2 Kings 6:17). Reality as the Bible defines it is more expansive that what can be seen or even experienced. Perhaps this is why the creeds require the faithful to say that they believe “in” the church rather than asking them to confess that they believe the church. It is a call to maintain a kind of double vision where the church is concerned.
I was reminded of this the other day, when I read a report by the Hartford Center for Religion Research, which said that an increasing number of pastors are considering leaving church ministry. After comparing data gathered from a survey of 1,700 religious leaders in the Fall of 2023 with earlier surveys, they concluded: “The further we are from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the more we observe larger percentages of clergy pondering alternatives to their present congregation, vocation, or both.”[5] According to the survey, over half of those surveyed reported seriously considering leaving pastoral ministry at least once since 2020. Nearly 20% more clergy reported having such thoughts than in 2021.
I confess that when I first read about this data in a report from Lifeway Research,[6] I wasn’t especially shocked. Ministerial discouragement isn’t new. It’s at least as old as Moses and Elijah (Exod. 5:22; Num. 11:11; 1 Kings 18:22). During the years I served as a pastor, I probably thought about quitting once a week, usually on a Monday.
Not every pastor leaves a church because they are disappointed. Many depart for the same reasons that the members of their congregation leave. Their life circumstances change. They feel called to a different kind of work or find it necessary to move to a different location. Nor can it be denied that some have good reason to be disappointed. If Jesus wondered how long He had to put up with those he characterized as an “unbelieving and perverse generation,” I guess there is room for us to feel a little frustration now and then too.
At the same time, I wonder if this data indicates something more than the ordinary Monday blues. Idealism is one thing. So is ordinary frustration. But unhealthy perfectionism is something else. It is a strain I recognize in myself. It is the church’s destiny to be perfect, but it is not yet the church’s practice. How can it be otherwise? The fact that the church must be equipped before it can fulfill its ministry means that those who serve it must work with a church that is not yet all it should be. This will be the case as long as pastors exist because when the church is finally perfected pastors will no longer be necessary.
Idealism can take noble forms, but it often wears the mask of perfectionism in pastoral ministry. When idealism disintegrates into perfectionism, the very weaknesses that mandate our ministry blind us to its beauty. Those who have been called to love and serve the church in its weakness begin to resent and despise it. “Anyone who glamorizes congregations does a grave disservice to pastors,” the late Eugene Peterson warned. “We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches and wonder what in the world we are doing wrong that our people don’t turn out that way under our preaching.”[7]
The only way to recover a true vision of the church is through the imagination. We must train our attention to see the church with the double vision that Scripture provides. One dimension of this view is to look unflinchingly and honestly at its weaknesses and shortcomings. The other is to look beyond these imperfections to the unseen spiritual realities that shape the church. As Augustine observed, it is part of a community of faith that travels in company in a procession that has lasted from the beginning of time to the end of days. This is “the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven” and keeps company with “God, the Judge of all,” and with “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Heb. 12:23).
The ancient church looked at the world differently than we do. They were indeed idealists. Yet they were at least realistic enough to know that a monk might have to spit, even in the presence of angels.
[1] Augustine, Sermo 341.9.11 quoted by Robert Markus in The End of Ancient Christianity, (New York: Cambridge, 1990), 22.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, (New York: Harper, 1987), 20.
[4] Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, (Notre Dame: University of Nortre Dame, 191981), 46.
[5] Hartford Institute for Relgion Research, “I’m Exhausted All the Time”: Exploring the Factors Contributing to Growing Clergy Discontentment,” January, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf.
[6] Aaron Earls, “Why Are More Pastors Thinking About Quitting?,” Lifeway Research, April 10, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf
[7] Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 17.