We worshipped underground for the first two and a half years. Our sanctuary was the basement of our home. Circumstance, not choice, dictated the place. In the local political atmosphere at the time, it was not permitted that public schools be used for religious purposes, and nothing else seemed available. So we chose the house with the largest basement. Our home was a suburban ranch house in a new housing subdivision on Saratoga Drive. We calculated that we would be able to seat 130 persons on folding chairs until we could construct a church that looked like a church.
Our home was two miles southeast of the small, historic, colonial village of Bel Air. At the center of the village there was a Presbyterian church, First Presbyterian, dating from just before the Civil War. It was constructed of stone with a bell tower for a spire, a “church that looked like a church.” Third-and fourth-generation families and many of the town’s leaders provided stability and leadership to the congregation. There was a fine pipe organ and an even finer organist to play it. The pastor, Richard Shreffler, the senior member of the clergy in town, known among his friends as His Holiness, greeted us with a warm welcome. And generosity—he encouraged the members of his congregation who lived in our neighborhood to join with us and help pioneer the new congregation. Thirty-one of them did.
Two months before our arrival, the Sparrow’s Point Presbyterian Church, twenty miles south of us, had closed its doors for good. For a hundred years it had been a flourishing church in the neighborhood of the Bethlehem Steel Company, a giant industrial complex. The congregation was made up of steel workers and a few of Bethlehem’s executives. For the previous twenty years the company had been gradually shutting down its operation. Finally it was down for good, and the congregation dispersed.
The elderly pastor of the church, Gus Mitchell, soldierly and stoical as he entered retirement, knowing that a new congregation was in the making a few miles north of him, offered us what was left of his church: a communion table, a baptismal font, three large pulpit chairs—all made of oak—and a set of communion ware complete with chalice, paten, and linen. I arrived in a borrowed pickup truck, an old International, to receive the gift. It was an emotional transaction for Gus, the pastor. As I realized what he was feeling, the loss of the symbols that had defined and centered his work for twenty-five years, it became a poignant moment also for me. I had not met him before. As it turned out, I would not see him again. He reminisced over his life with this congregation and welcomed me as I received what was left of it in the table and font and pulpit chairs. Conversation smoothed the transition. I thanked him for entrusting me with these holy things that would also define and center my work. He blessed me as I prepared to develop this new church. Another congregation donated an old pump organ, but failed to send along an organist to play it.
The exterior entrance to our sanctuary was down eight steps of a cement stairwell. The floor of the room was cement. The walls were cement blocks. There were six horizontal narrow exterior windows bordering the top of two of the walls at the outside ground level. After we had been worshipping in this bare, unadorned basement for about four months, Ruth, a vivacious sixteen-year-old, said to me as she was leaving after the benediction one Sunday, “I love worshipping in this place! I feel like one of the early Christians in the catacombs.” Her enthusiasm was contagious. Some of her friends overheard her. The name caught on with the youth. For everyone under twenty we were Catacombs Presbyterian Church.
The austere basement sanctuary turned out to provide the perfect setting for reimagining church apart from the stereotypes that most Americans, including me, would bring to it. It also had a suitable name—Catacombs. The name never got placed on a sign or printed on our stationary, but it seemed to authenticate noble and sturdy beginnings that reached back to our early ancestors.
But apart from the stereotypes, what is church? Why “church”?
The short answer that I had come to embrace through the years of my pastoral formation and that I anticipated taking shape in our catacombs sanctuary is that the Holy Spirit forms church to be a colony of heaven in the country of death, the country that William Blake named, in his comprehensive reimagining of the spiritual life, “land of Ulro.” Church is a core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not that kingdom complete, but it is that kingdom.
It had taken me a long time, with considerable help from wise Christians, both dead and alive, to come to this understanding of church: a colony of heaven in the country of death, a strategy of the Holy Spirit for giving witness to the already-inaugurated kingdom of God.
My understanding of church as I grew up was of a badly constructed house that had been lived in by renters who didn’t keep up with repairs, were sloppy housekeepers, and let crabgrass take over the lawn. It was the job of the pastor to do major repair work, renovate it from top to bottom, and clean out decades, maybe even centuries, of accumulated debris and make a fresh start.
I acquired this understanding from pastors who served the congregation I grew up in. They never lasted long in our small Montana town. It was not a way of life that appealed to me.
One of the memorable sermon texts on church, preached by every pastor I can remember, was from the Song of Songs: “You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.” The church was the beautiful Tirzah and the fierce army with banners. Those metaphors were filled with glorious imagery by my pastors. For at least thirty or forty minutes, our shabby fixer-upper church with its rotting front porch was transformed into something almost as good as the Second Coming itself.
Those sermons functioned like the picture on the front of a jigsaw-puzzle box. Faced with a thousand disconnected pieces spread out on the table, you keep that picture propped before you. You know that if you just stay with it long enough, all those pieces will finally fit together and make a beautiful picture. But my pastors never stayed with it long enough. Maybe they concluded that there had been some mistake in the packaging of the puzzle and many of the pieces had been accidentally left out. It became obvious to them that there were not enough pieces in the pews of our congregation to complete the picture of Tirzah and the army with banners, marching to make war against the devil and all his angels. My pastors always left after a couple of years for another congregation or some other employment. Obviously our church was too far gone in disrepair to spend any more time on it.
Later on in my young adulthood, I found that the romantic and crusader imagery that I had grown up with had changed. Sermons from the Song of Songs were no longer preached to eroticize or militarize the church. Bible texts were no longer sufficient for these things. Fresh imagery was now provided by American business. While I was growing up in my out-of-the-way small town, a new generation of pastors had reimagined church. Tirzah and the “terrible as an army with banners” had been scrapped and replaced with the imagery of an ecclesiastical business with a mission to market spirituality to consumers and make them happy.
For me, these were new terms for bringing the church’s mandate into focus. The church was no longer conceived as something in need of repair but as a business opportunity that would cater to the consumer tastes of spiritually minded sinners both within and without congregations. It didn’t take long for American pastors to find that this worked a lot more effectively as a strategy for whipping the church into shape than the centerfold Tirzah and terrible-as-an-army-with-banners sermons. Here were tried-and-true methods developed in the American business world that had an impressive track record of success.
As I was preparing myself to begin the work of developing a new congregation, I observed that pastors no longer preached fantasy sermons on what the church should be. They could actually do something about the shabby image the church had of itself. They could use advertising techniques to create an image of church as a place where Christians and their friends could mix with successful and glamorous people. Simple: remove pictures of the God of Gomorrah and Moriah and Golgotha from the walls of the churches and shift things around a bit to make the meeting places more consumer friendly. With God depersonalized and then repackaged as a principle or formula, people could shop at their convenience for whatever sounded or looked as if it would make their lives more interesting and satisfying on their terms. Marketing research quickly developed to show just what people wanted in terms of God and religion. As soon as pastors knew what it was, they could give it to them.
At the time that I took up my responsibilities for developing a new congregation, this understanding of church and pastor was widespread and vigorously promoted by virtually everyone who was supposed to know what they were talking about. I was watching both the church and my vocation as a pastor in it being relentlessly diminished and corrupted by being redefined in terms of running an ecclesiastical business. The ink on my ordination papers wasn’t even dry before I was being told by experts, so-called, in the field of church that my main task was to run a church after the manner of my brother and sister Christians who run service stations, grocery stores, corporations, banks, hospitals, and financial services. Many of them wrote books and gave lectures on how to do it. I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.
This is the Americanization of congregation. It means turning each congregation into a market for religious consumers, an ecclesiastical business run along the lines of advertising techniques, organizational flow charts, and energized by impressive motivational rhetoric. But this was worse. This pragmatic vocational embrace of American technology and consumerism that promised to rescue congregations from ineffective obscurity violated everything—scriptural, theological, experiential—that had formed my identity as a follower of Jesus and as a pastor. It struck me as far worse than the earlier erotic and crusader illusions of church. It was a blasphemous desecration of the way of life to which the church had ordained me—something on the order of a vocational abomination of desolation.
But for right now we were safe in the catacombs. The lies would have a hard time penetrating our cement bunker. There was nothing marketable about either the place where we were meeting or the people who were gathering there. Nobody came to the catacombs to add comfort or aesthetic quality or pizzazz to their lives. The childhood and adolescent illusions of church that I grew up with didn’t survive very long as I was finding my way as a pastor in the church, worshipping and working for the most part with decidedly unglamorous and often desultory men and women. There were always a few exceptions but nothing that matched the lissome Tirzah or the terrible army or the newly franchised Church of What’s Happening Now.
Vivacious Ruth’s Catacombs Presbyterian Church was readily picked up by the younger set. It struck just the right note and provided precisely the right visual image for getting back to Square One. As we worshipped in our underground sanctuary, we were voluntarily setting aside both churchly and secular expectations and religious stereotypes of what church was and what pastors did.
There was another element embedded in our newly acquired catacombs identity that helped to provide me at least with imaginative distance from the Americanized consumer culture in which we were all living. I hadn’t been in the neighborhood for very long before learning that many of my neighbors had excavated bomb shelters beneath or in the backyards of their homes. It was the era of Sputnik, and suburbia was preparing to survive a nuclear attack. Given the hysteria of fear that was permeating the times, I didn’t say anything to anyone, but I wondered if people might notice that Catacombs Presbyterian was providing a very different kind of underground sanctuary, preparing us for the kingdom of God. I hoped someone might notice. Nobody did. Or if they did, nothing was said. Even so, the catacombs, like the bomb shelters scattered through the neighborhood, protected us from radiation fallout that was destroying the seed antibodies of leaven and salt and light among God’s people and that was resulting in lethal cancerous growth throughout the body of Christ in America.
The catacombs gave us a kind of protected laboratory setting for going back to Square One in matters of church. Square One here meant the Acts of the Apostles. I would immerse myself and our church-in-formation in the story of the first church-in-formation. Acts would give us a text for cleansing our perceptions from the blurring and distorting American stereotypes.
I didn’t know how long we would be worshipping underground. I didn’t know how long it would take to gather a congregation that understood itself as a people of God—a church. I didn’t know how long it would take to gather the financial resources to build a sanctuary. Several months? Several years? I had no way of knowing. (It ended up being two and a half years.) But I did know that this time in the catacombs was precious—a protected time and place to develop an understanding of what we were as a church apart from the competing and distracting stereotypes that many of us were carrying with us of “a church that looks like a church.”
There were many things ahead of us. But “one thing was needful.” Together, pastor and people, we needed a grounding in the nature of what we were about, what church was, what we were becoming as church. We were given the gift of doing it in an out-of-the-way place without a lot of kibitzers giving us advice and comparing us to others in the church business that they had observed or read about. We were not exactly keeping what we were doing a secret, but we were going to embrace the anonymity of our basement sanctuary for as long as it was given to us—a place set aside for the worship of God—and we would take as our text the story of church formation given to us in the Acts of the Apostles, the story of the formation and development of the first church.
For several weeks I had been getting acquainted with people in the community, most of them newly or recently arrived from all over the country—this was classic suburbia. Day after day I went from house to house, telling people what I was doing. Some of them expressed interest. Occasionally I was greeted with hostility. A woman on Ring Factory Road invited me in and when we were seated asked me, “Do you get paid for doing this?” I said that I did. Accusingly, she snapped, “Don’t you know that is forbidden by the Bible? You are a tool of the devil.”
That tipped me off that she was a member of a sect that I was familiar with, a sect that was convinced that all clergy were in league with the Antichrist. I feigned surprise that such a thing was in the Bible and asked where it was written. She had a Bible on the coffee table and fumbled to find the citation. After letting her fumble for a while, I asked her to let me see if I could find it. I did a little fumbling myself and then said, “Is this what you were looking for?” I read Jesus’s words to his followers whom he was sending into the neighborhood to tell people about him: “Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses…neither shoes…”
She said, “That’s it.” I looked up, and then down at her feet. She was wearing an expensive looking pair of red shoes.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll work for nothing, beginning right now, if you will get rid of those shoes and go barefoot.”
She wasn’t amused. I was disappointed that she got me out of the house before I had a chance to read the rest of what Jesus said on that occasion: “Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.” I felt a little gypped that I had to “shake off the dust” without an audience.
There were a few more instances when I shook the dust off my feet but none that compared with the satisfaction of leaving the house on Ring Factory and the lady with the red shoes. Mostly I was invited into homes to exchange stories. Some were lapsed Catholics, some enthusiastic charismatics, some lifelong Methodists, some veteran Presbyterians, a few burned-out Baptists. Before long I was meeting “the others,” men and women who knew nothing about church and had never been interested in the Christian faith but were curious.
Obviously, the first thing we needed to do as we gathered to worship in our catacombs sanctuary was to establish a common ground. I couldn’t take anything for granted. I didn’t expect the woman with red shoes to show up, nor did she. So—the story of the Church at Square One. We gathered each Sunday for worship: “Let us worship God.” By this time we were used to the conversational language of story with one another. It was time to introduce another story: the Church at Square One, the Acts of the Apostles.
Luke wrote two books: the story of Jesus (the Gospel) and the story of the church (the Acts). The story of Jesus is an account of Jesus revealing God to us, Jesus as God among us, Jesus telling us stories and doing things that make us insiders to God’s salvation, Jesus inviting men and women to follow and trustingly participate with him in what he was calling the kingdom of God. Three other first-century writers—Matthew, Mark, and John—wrote this same Jesus story, with variations. But Luke went on to write a second book (he is the only Gospel writer to do this), telling the story of the church: the followers of Jesus who after his death, resurrection, and ascension became a community of Jesus. This community was called church. The term church occurs twenty-four times in Acts, more than in any other biblical book.
As we began a life of worship together as a church-in-formation, my intent was to ground whatever was going to develop among us in the next months and years into the story of the church-in-formation in Acts. I wanted to get our imaginations so saturated in Acts that we would be alert to noticing and participating in the church-in-formation that was us. Acts would be our text. We would listen to this text. We would hear God speak to us from this text. It didn’t take us long to get the hang of what Luke is doing. He is rewriting the story of Jesus as it is now lived by the community of Jesus. It is the same story: the story of Catacombs Presbyterian in Maryland and the story of Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem.
Our first service of worship in the catacombs was November 11, 1962. Forty-six worshippers were present. I preached my first sermon from Acts. I preached forty-six sermons from Acts over the next thirty months, most of them in the first year. (I was never aware of the repeated forty-six until just now while writing this. I wonder if it means anything.) I wanted to drench the collective imagination of my congregation in the story of church as a reliving, a retelling of the story of Jesus.
I had been having conversations with my fledgling congregation for several weeks by now and realized that we—congregation and pastor—had very different concepts of church. Most of us read the story of Jesus as the story of God doing for us what he wills for us: the story of Jesus, the story of God among us, revealing himself to us, calling us, saving us. But the moment Jesus ascends into heaven as told in Acts, the story shifts to church. It is common at this point to let Jesus slip into the background and proceed to understand the story of church as what we are doing for God. Doing for Jesus to be sure, doing in the name of Jesus certainly. But we are in charge. We are now making the decisions. We have Jesus’s commands; we have Jesus’s example. But now it is up to us: we take responsibility for the church. Or we don’t.
The American stereotype of church. Salvation is God’s business. It is what God does. And then he turns it over to us. Church is our business. It is what we do. God, having given himself to us in Jesus, now retires to the sidelines and we take over. Occasionally we call a time-out to consult with God. But basically, we are the action.
But that is not the way Acts tells the story.
I thought that my pastoral task at this point was to do my best to get my congregation to understand scripture, and for right now Acts, as a story. Not Acts as information about our church ancestors, not a record of the assent to truth required for membership, but a story that includes us, a story in which we are invited in as participants. The conditions were ideal. We were in an informal setting with people we were getting to know. It doesn’t take long to get to know the names of forty-six people. And given welcoming and congenial conditions, it isn’t long before the names expand into stories. As newcomers gradually arrived, they became incorporated into the naming and storytelling. Stereotypes began to fall away.
Calvin was a long-haul truck driver with an eighth-grade education and talked like it. He lived with his wife and kids in a trailer-park mobile home wallpapered with Elvis Presley posters. He obviously wouldn’t fit in with our mostly white-collar, college-educated, suburban congregation. He had married June, a Presbyterian girl who hadn’t been to church since childhood Sunday school. He had recently returned home from a trip and told June what had just happened to him. Driving through Tennessee, listening to the CB radios of other truckers on the road, he was suddenly violently repulsed by the obscenities and pornographic stories that were polluting his cab. He shut off his radio and prayed. “God, save me. Give me a clean life. I can’t live like this any longer.” He told June, “I think I’m a Christian. Let’s go to church.”
June had heard of our basement church from a neighbor and thought it might be just the place for her and Calvin together to make a fresh start. Calvin and June and their three children attended Catacombs Presbyterian the next Sunday. Calvin didn’t know that he didn’t fit. And as people heard his story and he heard theirs, they didn’t know that he didn’t fit—common ground began to appear beneath their feet. Within a year he had been chosen by the congregation to serve as deacon.
You never knew who was going to show up at Catacombs Presbyterian. There were no entrance requirements and nothing in the catacomb itself to tell us what was going on there. But for those who entered and stayed (not everyone stayed; not everyone wanted to know and be known), something like a story developed, the story of church, the story of the Church at Square One.
There is this about a story: when we get caught up in a story, we don’t know how it is going to end. Nor do we know who else is going to be part of the story. Nobody expected Calvin and June to show up. Nothing in a skillfully told story is predictable. But also, nothing is without meaning—every detail, every word, every name, every action is part of the story.
If we get acquainted with church in language that comes to us in the form of the story, we don’t know exactly what is going to take place or who will be in it or how it will end. We can only trust or not trust the storyteller to be honest in the story he or she tells. If the story of the first church is told in the form of story, we are given encouragement to understand our new church also in the form of story. That means we can’t know the details of how it will look, who will be in it, or how it will end. The only thing we know for sure is that it is the story of Jesus being retold with us being the ones listening, responding, following, believing, obeying—or not.
Knowing that helps enormously in reading Acts. And knowing that Acts is a story of the coming into being and development of church helped enormously in understanding and participating in what we were doing as Catacombs Presbyterian Church. We were developing a vocabulary—God, Jesus, Spirit—for noticing and discerning and participating in what we didn’t see, the church that was coming into being among us.
Acts is not a manual with blueprints and a set of instructions on how to be a church. Acts is not a utopian fantasy on what a perfect church would look like. Acts is a detailed story of the ways in which the first church became a church. A story is not a script to be copied. A story develops a narrative sense in us so that we, alert to the story of Jesus, will be present and obedient and believing as we participate in the ways that the Holy Spirit is forming the Jesus life in us. The plot (Jesus) is the same. But the actual places and circumstances and names will be different and form a narrative that is unique to our time and place, circumstances and people.
Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever—in Rome and Moscow and London and Baltimore—the only thing changed being the translation of the menu.
But if we don’t acquire a narrative sense, a story sense, with the expectation that we are each one of us uniquely ourselves—participants in the unique place and time and weather of where we live and worship—we will always be looking somewhere else or to a different century for a model by which we can be an authentic and biblical church. The usefulness of Acts as a story, and not a prescription or admonition, is that it keeps us faithful to the plot, Jesus, and at the same time free to respond out of our own circumstances and obedience.
After a couple months, Calvin and June invited Jan and me for dinner in their trailer-park home with interior design by Elvis Presley. They wanted to talk about the story they were finding themselves in. The children all had a voice in the story. Calvin said that he had never read a book in his entire life, and he was now thirty-seven. But he was now halfway through the New Testament and was telling the Jesus stories to his children. I asked him where he came up with a Bible. He hesitated. It was a Gideon Bible. He had stolen it from a motel while on the road.
Calvin and June occasionally had questions. They would call or drop by. But there was no question in their minds about what they were doing—they were in a story in which God was speaking and acting.
What had set me off on this strategy—the church as story—in the weeks preceding our first gathering for worship in our catacombs sanctuary was the question, repeated with variations in virtually every conversation I would have those days, “When will you build this church?” or “What kind of church are you talking about?” or “Is this going to be a biblical (or Bible) church?” It was the same question Jesus was asked as he was getting his followers ready to be the first church: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
When is this going to happen? How long do we have to wait? When does construction begin?
Jesus’s response was “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”
In other words, it’s none of your business. Your question is irrelevant. That kind of information is of no use to you. It would probably confuse you, might discourage you, and would certainly distract you.
Was it the Spirit of God that directed me to begin with this text? It seemed so at the time, and circumstances confirmed it. I introduced Acts as the text for understanding and participating biblically in becoming a church, a congregation in the Maryland hills in AD 1962 in continuity with the church in the Judean city of Jerusalem in AD 33.
By this time my pastoral understanding of congregation had jelled: if we were to be formed as a church after the pattern of Acts, we absolutely had to absorb it into our imaginations as a story, not a manual, a story that gave us room to respect our church-in-formation in all its unique particularities. A story to enter, not a blueprint to follow. The stories in Acts unobtrusively began to meld with the stories we were telling one another in the catacombs. Stereotypes began to blur.
Delores was forty years old and single, living with her elderly parents, who had retired from farming. She held down a menial desk job with the telephone company. But that was only temporary work until she found her place in the musical world as a singer. She was a soprano with aspirations to the opera. Her parents had encouraged her, providing her with voice lessons ever since she was sixteen. She had heard about our new church from a fellow worker and got her parents to invite me to their home to get acquainted.
The farm buildings were kept up, and the fences in good repair. Only the milk cows were missing—the forty head of cattle that they had milked for fifty-two years. The green Maryland hills were bucolic. The parents let me know how much they admired me for taking on the daunting task of forming a new congregation and suggested that they might be interested in offering their lifelong experience of leadership in the church to help us out. “Life on a farm and in a congregation are a lot alike—we can help each other.” I also learned that Delores was an accomplished singer. They began attending our Sunday services.
After a couple months the parents came to see me. They wanted to let me know that Delores was quite shy and didn’t like to put herself forward but that if I asked her, she would be quite willing to sing a solo during our Sunday worship. I asked her. She came by after work the next week with some musical selections from which I could choose. We agreed on one that would fit into the order of worship that I had planned. It never occurred to me to ask her to rehearse it for me. I had it on her parents’ authority, after all, that she was “accomplished.”
Her debut on Sunday was excruciating. She belted out “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” with operatic zest but with all the higher notes flat. It was like fingernails scraping a chalkboard. I arranged to visit with her on Wednesday over lunch at a restaurant near her workplace. I wanted a chance to get acquainted with her apart from her parents. I wanted to find out if there might be an area of her life other than rehearsing for the opera in which I could find a foothold as her pastor. But music was her entire life—singing was God’s gift to her, and she wanted to share the gift. The visit didn’t work. But I wasn’t ready to give up.
By now I suspected that finding a church for Delores to sing in was more her parents’ ambition than Delores’s. Playing for time so I could get to know her personally apart from the role of operatic diva she had been given by her parents, I asked her to sing a couple more times at two-month intervals. But that didn’t work either. Within a year the family had given up on both me and the congregation. I later learned that a similar strategy for getting Delores a place to sing had failed in most of the churches in our county. But this is also part of the church as story. Not everyone wants to be in the story if she (or he) doesn’t have a starring role.
I observed Ben with considerable interest in the first community-association meeting I attended in our new neighborhood. There were forty or fifty men and women in attendance. I had asked if I could make a brief announcement to the association about the church that I was organizing in this newly developed subdivision. They let me. I introduced myself and what I was hoping to do. Then the business of the meeting began. It turned out to be the most rancorous, uncivil, angry exchange of ideas, concerns, and problems that I would have thought possible among neighbors. These people hardly knew one another but already they didn’t like one another.
Ben was the angriest of the lot. I thought at the time, I’ve got my work cut out for me. If any group of people needs a church, this one does. Ben, with his wife and teenage daughter, was in our basement church the next Sunday. He sat in my congregation every Sunday until his death, twenty-seven years later. He never spoke to me, only perfunctory nods. Never sang a hymn, never recited the Creed. Once when he was hospitalized, I visited him. I tried to make small talk but failed. As I was getting ready to leave, he said, “No praying. If you have to pray, do it in silence,” the only words I ever remember his speaking to me. I wonder if he also prayed in silence. Maybe he was more in the story than he intended.
Francis was a recent college graduate from the Midwest who had moved to our community, employed to teach high-school biology. He had no social graces but made up for it by being exceptionally intelligent. Unlike Ben, he always spoke to me as he left worship. What he said was always a criticism of my sermon. Sometimes he corrected my grammar or pronunciation. Sometimes he argued with my interpretation of the text. Sometimes it had to do with failing to address a social or political condition that needed dealing with. But always something. It wouldn’t have been so irritating if he had been ignorant or misinformed, but he was mostly right. And always rude. It was a relief to have him return to his parents’ home near Chicago for the summer vacation. But he continued his harassment—it felt to me like harassment—by means of letters. He had taken me on as a cause. Two years later he moved back to the Midwest, and I thought he was out of my life. But he wasn’t done with me. A sermon tape his friends sent him would set him off, or a book of mine he read. After three or four years, he lost interest. Concluding, I am sure, that I was incorrigibly unteachable.
And Oscar, a colonel retired from the army after a career in the military. He was a veteran of World War II and was always in attendance at worship. He also always went to sleep halfway through the first scripture reading. In the early days of the church I arranged with my elders that one of them would join me in leading worship each Sunday. Oscar was the first to do it. Early in the service, after the opening prayers and the first hymn, he was to lead the congregation in the antiphonal reading from the Psalter. When it was time for Oscar to lead, nothing happened. I looked over, and Oscar was sound asleep. So I stood up and did it myself. He continued to sleep through the service. After the benediction his wife spoke to me, “Don’t you think Oscar can better serve the Lord in some other way than making him a poster child for ‘he gives to his beloved sleep’?” I agreed. He told me later that through those war years he had developed the capacity to sleep under stress anywhere and in whatever circumstances. He was a translator of Russian and spent most of three years being driven in a jeep from place to place along the Eastern Front. Most Sundays he slept while I prayed and preached. But at least he was there. I had no idea that my sermons were that stressful.
Jan and I talked this over a lot in the catacombs—stories and the way stories work. Getting to know these men and women as participants in God’s story, not as problems that we can fix. Letting them be themselves. Not trying to force them into the story. Americans are not used to taking stories seriously as a way to deepen our participation in the communities where we live and as a way to expand our participation in what God is doing. The language we are taught in our schools is language as information: naming and explaining. We are also taught language for getting things done: making things, solving problems, going to the moon.
Knowing things, knowing how to name the world, knowing how to read and write, knowing what is going on, is important. And making things, making bread, making money, making airplanes, is important.
But language as participation? Language as a means of relationship? Language that involves us with other people? Language that deepens our capacities for community? Language that forms Calvin and Delores and Ben and Francis and Oscar into a church?
The catacombs were serving us well. But not everyone entered the story, at least the part we were telling. Coffee following the benediction and an occasional potluck Sunday lunch or supper provided a congenial setting for practicing (they didn’t know what we were practicing) listening to and telling one another stories.
But there was more to it than that. The reason that as a church-in-formation it is so important—more than important, essential—to absorb and distinguish the different ways that language is used is that the primary way language is used in church is in worship, and the language of worship is the language of participation. And the primary form for this language of participation is story: song and story, conversation and story, poetry and story. But, pervasively, story.
I thought if I could get this storytelling way of language going among us, I might be able to minimize, maybe even eliminate, the gulf between the language used by Luke telling the story of the church in Acts and the language we were using to tell our church-in-formation stories in the catacombs. And maybe, just maybe, this could prevent us from mindlessly disconnecting ourselves from Acts and going it on our own, dealing with the church impersonally and functionally. We were starting to get it. As we nurtured this participatory, narrative language, we were showing signs of recognizing Jesus, present in the Holy Spirit in Acts, speaking and acting in our stories in our catacombs church. In the same way that those first Christians became a church as they participated in the stories and prayers and deeds of Jesus in the “days of his flesh,” we were dealing with one another in our worship of Jesus as the Holy Spirit was forming us into a church. Calvin, Delores, Ben, Francis, and Oscar were no better or worse than the 120 who were gathered together and about to become the church on the day of Pentecost.
Here is something, if you can believe it, new to me. Despite all my years of reading the Bible, I had never noticed the way Luke set the two birth stories, the birth of Jesus and the birth of church, in almost exact parallel: Luke 1–2, the story of the birth of Jesus, our Savior; Acts 1–2, the story of the birth of church, our salvation community.
None of us, beginning with me, had an imagination adequate to take this in. We thought we were forming a church. After all, we were getting to know one another. We were anticipating the work of organization, matters of finance and architecture. Someone had to set out the folding metal chairs on Sunday morning for worship. Fred lived only a block away and said he would take care of that. Energetically social Beatrice saw the need for coffee to be brewed and served following the benediction and volunteered to organize it. But we had no more sense of what was going on to form a church in our catacombs than any of us had when the embryos that were once us were being formed in our mothers’ wombs. But we were learning.
We were learning that the Acts text set the entire church operation as the work of the Holy Spirit. We were also learning that folding chairs, the urn of coffee, and financial reports were included in the operation.
This “conceived by the Holy Spirit” way of understanding what was going on in our Maryland basement, this cement bunker, as parallel to what had gone on in Mary amounted to a totally new way of thinking about church. Some people call this a “paradigm shift.” It meant shifting from one way of organizing our understanding of reality, making sense of it, to something totally different. It was like the shift that took place from Ptolemy, who told us that the sun goes around the earth, which it obviously does from our subjective point of view, to Galileo, who told us that the earth and our entire planetary system, goes around the sun, which no one would guess by looking, and which, of course, no one had guessed for many thousands of years by just looking. Comprehension was slow and incremental. I may have been the slowest to assimilate, in large part because I had been given responsibility to organize this congregation. I was being paid to do it. I needed to keep up my end of the bargain.
New Church Development (NCD), the umbrella organization under which I worked, had developed a thick loose-leaf notebook of guidelines and instructions on how to go about organizing and developing a congregation. It was always open on my desk. I studied it meticulously. The man who prepared it and gave it to me, Franklin—he was the first person I had talked to about the possibility of developing a new church—had never organized a church himself, but he had thought of everything. Except for that paradigm shift—the shift from understanding church as what we do to continue the work of Jesus in his absence to understanding church as the creation and continuing work of the Holy Spirit. The paradigm shift from understanding the church in terms of what we plan and accomplish and take responsibility for (the Ptolemy paradigm) to understanding church as what God plans and accomplishes and takes responsibility for (the Galileo paradigm). The Ptolemy paradigm is oriented around what we can observe and understand by naked-eye observation. The Galileo paradigm is oriented to a great deal that we cannot understand and account for by naked-eye observation.
Franklin’s red three-ringed loose-leaf notebook, except for occasional asides, operated out of a Ptolemaic paradigm. This and this and this is how a church is formed. Ptolemy is a lot of help in day-by-day things—how to calculate sunrise and sunset, how to figure out a calendar, how to organize a committee, how to prepare a budget. But if we are going cosmic (read “kingdom of God”), we need a way of taking into account numerous invisibles—gamma rays and speed of light and gravitation (read Holy Spirit and Trinity and salvation). In those early months the red notebook, commonly referred to as NCB (New Church Bible), was referred to less and less as I and my embryonic congregation reoriented ourselves in the parallel birth-of-Jesus/birth-of-church stories in the Gospels and Acts.
How did God bring our Savior into our history? We have the story of what he could have done but didn’t. God could have sent his son into the world to turn all the stones into bread and solve the hunger problem worldwide. He didn’t do it. He could have sent Jesus on tour though Palestine, filling in turn the seven grand amphitheaters and hippodromes built by Herod and amazing everyone with supernatural circus performances, impressing the crowds with Super-God in action. He didn’t do it. He could have set Jesus up to take over governing the world—no more war, no more injustice, no more crime. He didn’t do it.
We also have the story of what he, in fact, did do. He gave us the miracle of Jesus, but a miracle in the form of a helpless infant born in poverty in a dangerous place with neither understanding nor support from the political, religious, or cultural surroundings. Jesus never left that world he had been born into, that world of vulnerability, marginality, and poverty.
And then the parallel question: how did he bring our salvation community into our history? (We were getting the hang of this by now.) Pretty much the same way he brought our Savior into the world—by a miracle, every bit as miraculous as the birth of Jesus, but also under the same conditions as the birth of Jesus. Celebrities were conspicuously absent. Governments were oblivious.
God gave us the miracle of congregation with the same sign he gave us the miracle of Jesus, by the descent of the dove. The Holy Spirit descended into the womb of Mary in the Galilean village of Nazareth. Thirty or so years later the same Holy Spirit descended into the collective womb of men and women, which included Mary, who had been followers of Jesus. The first conception gave us Jesus, the second conception gave us church.
It was a miracle that didn’t look like a miracle—a miracle using the powerless, the vulnerable, the unimportant. Not so very different from any random congregation we might look up in the yellow pages of our telephone directories. When Paul described his first-generation new-church development in Corinth—“not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many of noble birth, but…the low and despised in the world”—he could have been writing about us.
Some people have a hard time believing that Jesus was conceived in the virgin womb of Mary. We were having a hard time believing that the church was being conceived in that catacomb womb which was us. But we stayed with the story. It would have been a lot easier to imagine a church formed from an elite group of talented men and women who hungered for the “beauty of holiness,” congregations as stunning as the curvaceous Tirzah and as terrifying to the forces of evil as the army with banners. But then where would we be? We wouldn’t have had a chance of being part of it.
The story had its way with us. It became more and more clear that when God forms a church, he starts with the nobodies. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works. Those are the people he started with—Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, Anna and Simeon—to bring our Savior into the world. Why would he change strategies in bringing the salvation community, church, this congregation into formation?
Luke is a careful storyteller. The longer we paid attention to the way Luke told the story of Jesus in the Gospel and paid attention to the way he told the story of the church in Acts, the better we were able to see ourselves in continuity with what was taking place right before us in the catacombs. Comprehension came slowly. Maybe more slowly for me than for the forty-six who started out with me on November 11, 1962. Those old romantic illusions of sweet Tirzah and the terrible army were hard to give up. And the deceptive rush of adrenaline and the ego satisfaction that would put me in control of a religious business were continually seductive. Spiritual consumerism, the sin “crouching at the door” that did Cain in, was always there. But Luke’s storytelling had its way with all of us. We began to understand ourselves on Luke’s terms. Emily Dickinson has a wonderful line in which she says that “the truth must dazzle gradually or every man go blind.”
We were acquiring a church identity as the truth that dazzles gradually. We were learning how to submit ourselves to the Spirit’s formation of congregation out of this mixed bag of humanity that was us—broken, hobbling, crippled, sexually abused and spiritually abused, emotionally unstable, passive and passive-aggressive, neurotic men and women. Chuck at fifty who has failed a dozen times and knows that he will never amount to anything. Mary who had been ignored and scorned and abused in a marriage in which she remained faithful. Phyllis living with children and a spouse deep in addictions. Lepers and blind and deaf-and-dumb sinners. Also fresh converts, excited to be in on this new life. Spirited young people, energetic and eager to be guided into a life of love and compassion, mission and evangelism. A few seasoned saints who know how to pray and listen and endure. And a considerable number of people who pretty much just showed up. I sometimes wonder why they bothered. There they are: the hot, the cold, and the lukewarm; Christians, half-Christians, almost-Christians; New Agers, angry ex-Catholics, sweet new converts. I didn’t choose them. I didn’t get to choose them.
The paradigm shift started taking place for me in my father’s butcher shop and my mother’s songs and stories. Those thirty months in the catacombs completed it. We didn’t get a church formed to our expectations. But once we understood that the Holy Spirit brings church into being his way, not ours, we saw something very different, a Spirit-created community that forms Christ in this place—not in some rarefied “spiritual” sense—precious souls for whom Christ died. They are that, too, but it takes a while to see it, see the various parts of Christ’s body here and now: a toe here, a finger there, sagging buttocks and breasts, skinned knees and elbows. Paul’s metaphor of the church as members of Christ’s body is not a mere metaphor. Metaphors have teeth. They keep us grounded to what is right before our eyes. At the same time they keep us connected to all those operations of the Trinity that we can’t see.
Those months in the catacombs were exactly what we needed to free us from the lingering romantic, crusader, and consumer images of church that in various configurations all of us brought with us. We had been given sufficient time and a congenial place to have our imaginations cleansed of church-that-looks-like-a-church illusions and to have the Holy Spirit paradigm shift established. Not totally, of course. It would always be an ongoing work in progress. But without this substantial “cleansing” and “shift” that took place in the catacombs, we would not have been able to recognize and participate in the actual church that was being formed among us. Without that, the church that most of us expected and wanted would have become the enemy of the church we were being given.