The Eucharist Makes the Church1
Scott Cowdell
Careerminded clergy are wise not to say this publicly, but there is a crisis of identity and purpose in our Church today that defies easy solution. I am not referring to the fallout over clergy sexual abuse, though this excruciating development does help to explain the problem that we face. Which is that the Church in general and the Eucharist in particular have become optional extras in living a good life, even for living the Christian life, and widely derided options at that. Hence a glaring failure of spiritual vision, compassion, and pastoral leadership on the part of abusers and Church leaders is matched by a new pitch of scapegoating rectitude directed toward the whole Church by its cultured despisers. We are paying the price for our longstanding fascination in the Church with respectability and for claiming the moral high ground, since our institutional feet of clay and our share in the ordinary traffic of human ill will, folly and misery have now been fully exposed. Such respectability was what Church and worship were all about during my suburban 1960s Queensland boyhood, though of course winds of change had begun to blow throughout the Western world at that time, in the direction of moral autonomy, and the exhilaration of being able to choose how our lives are to be lived. Church as a valued part of community life, a marker of respectability, and even a badge of social status are now by and large limited to smaller rural communities in Australia, if they survive at all.
A leading layman once told me that he came to church for the music and to keep his wife happy—but he was in his 70s; noone under 50 would think like that anymore. The former Scots bishop and now atheist, Richard Holloway, paints an unsparing picture in his memoirs of this increasingly bygone type of Church that is more habituated than embraced, providing for many people little more than a sense of connection with the past and a vague feeling of something transcendent.2 For a time the Church suited Holloway’s own romantic and melancholy temperament, but eventually the dysfunction associated with Church membership among many of his fellow Anglicans got the better of him. A lot of psychological and spiritual immaturity clings to the Church still—those people seem to hang on in there where many more confident and healthyminded people have had enough and have moved on.
The Canadian theologian Gary Badcock gets to the bottom of today’s mass exodus from the Church, explaining why so many have opted out since the personal and social benefits once associated with the Church are now recognised as being more widely available:
the hungry sheep look up, remain unfed, and have decided in the hundreds of millions that they can find the same thing (and it is the same thing) in more convincing forms from the other available consumerist alternatives that equally serve the end of individual flourishing: popular culture, environmental activism, uninhibited sex, the fulfilment of career ambition, politics, or even crass materialism.3
For those healthierminded ones who stay with the Church, there is often no clear sense of why they have stayed, or a strong likelihood that their belonging would survive anything much in the way of provocations or setbacks. Even the real, genuine believers who are trying to make a go of following Christ, with a clearer sense than their parents may well have had about what being a Christian means, are typically less clear about the place, the necessity and the authority of the Church in their Christian lives.