What makes a community of faith?

Many delight in describing the Church as a community of faith.  It is not wrong.  In fact, that is exactly what the Church is -- a community of faith.  It has become popular to insist that within that community there needs also to be diversity.  Diversity has, in fact, become the byword of our age as a necessary ingredient to nearly everything -- from school to congregation to business to government.  Diversity has, for all practical purposes, become the most important ingredient within the community of faith that is the Church -- just as it has for the other arenas listed above.  It would be good, however, to begin with what it is that makes a community of faith a community.

The first aspect of a community of faith is that they have a shared faith or belief.  For lack of a better way of putting it, they confess a common creed.  A community requires some level of commonality in order to be a community.  People are not a community because they say they are.  The roots of community run deep -- as deep as the core beliefs by which they understand who they are and why they are.  For the Church, it is impossible to be a community when the most basic and foundational criteria of their existence are in doubt or in conflict.  The Church is not a community of seekers but confessors.  We are not gathered by our common questions but our common answers.  In order for this to happen, the Church must be a community united around what they believe about the Scriptures.  It is not enough to confess that the Word of God is in the Scriptures unless you also agree which words in the Word are God's and which are not.  Lutherans, like Roman Catholics and other conservative faiths, have traditionally confessed without reservation that all of Scripture is God's Word.  Of course, all that has changed of late.  In Lutheranism as well as across Rome and Protestantism, there has been a dilution of this statement and it has become one of the most serious challenges to the community of the Church.  Either we are united in faith around God's Word or we have no common creed and therefore nothing to bind us together more than our fickle wills.

The second aspect of a community of faith is that we have a common history.  This does not mean that we have all experienced the same history or that we experienced all the history.  What it does mean is that we claim this history as our own.  Christianity has a creed -- everyone knows that.  We also have God's story -- that is the Bible.  But we also have the history of God's people in the unbroken succession of those who have believed and confessed Christ crucified and risen.  Lutherans, for example, have acknowledged this from the get go.  We confess a catholic and apostolic faith and we own the history.  We have a story older than we are but it is our story just the same.  The early church is our story and down through every age and epoch of history we stand with those who went before.  If your history begins with you, with a specific date in history in which some constitutional documents were proclaimed, that is a problem.  In fact, that is pretty much the definition of a sect -- it begins everything with itself and is self-referential in the worst of ways.  No self-respecting Lutheran can begin history with 1483 or 1517 or 1540 or 1580.  We do not live in the imagination of our own definition but stand with those who went before us.  Chesterton is pretty clear about this and every Lutheran worth his salt will stand on this hill.  We do not simply live in the moment nor do we live for the future but we live upon the shoulders of the giants of the faith who went before us and confessed with us the mystery of the Trinity.

The third aspect of a community of faith is that we have a piety or practice.  We are not all doing our own thing but we have an order, rite, ceremony, usage, and ritual life that is also in common with those who went before and those who are and we pass it down to those who are to come.  One of the most abhorrent abuses of adiaphora is the idea that if it is not required, it is not important and can be left to taste as if liberty were a higher value than order.  We don't make rules about everything because we should not have to.  We ought to know how to live together in charity - those learning with those who have already learned.  We ought to desire the unity of order that manifests to those inside and outside who we are.  Community has manners and etiquette and personal liberty submits to these protocols not as chains that bind but yielding in love for the sake of the many (including a vote from the democracy of the dead).  So we have a common life together which transcends the value of personal taste or freedom.  We order our life together in an ordo or pattern older than we are.  We order our time in a calendar which proclaims the story of Christ and teaches us His Word as a common pulse or rhythm to our common life (which, by the way, includes a lectionary).  We order our lives within this community of faith according to a common set of values anchored not in the vote of the majority but the revelation of God and in sync with His will and purpose. 

Community is always diverse as the uncommon threads of our individual histories is woven into the common fabric of who we are as the people of God.  Community cannot be born from a diversity which values individual truths, stories, and habitus over the common creed, history, and practice of the Church.  It simply will not be a community anymore but merely a gathering of individuals in the same place at the same time.  Unfortunately, that is what some people desire the Church to be -- a people with nothing much in common except their desire to be together.  We have already applied that definition to family and look where that has gotten us.  No, family and community have an identity which is bigger than any one of us or there is no family or community at all.  Calling yourself a community does not make it so.