Instituting the Church in the world

Much of Christian life is spent inside institutions that are not the Church. We are formed by schools, workplaces, charities, neighborhoods, households, and civic bodies, and we rightly want those places to be ordered toward truth rather than falsehood. In a fragmented and often hostile world, this desire is not hard to understand. We want institutions that protect, strengthen, and form those entrusted to them. The danger is that this good desire can shift from forming Christians for the world to building institutions that function as substitutes for the Church.

Education is only one example, but it is a revealing one. In a Christian primary and secondary school context familiar to me, the desire to be recognizably distinct from the surrounding culture can begin to eclipse the academic excellence that belongs to the school’s Christian calling. The problem is not a lack of piety. It is that piety can become detached from the work of education and then used to excuse a thinner account of that work.

The same confusion appears whenever we begin to imagine that the goal of a Christian school or university is to become something like a church. It may appear in the assumption that the institution should provide the full shape of Christian belonging, or in the expectation that its common life should resemble an ecclesial community, or in the fear that contact with the broader world is primarily a threat to be managed rather than a field of mission and service. In such cases, the institution does not merely seek to be faithfully Christian in its own proper mode. It begins to take on the imaginative weight of the Church itself.

This is where we need greater care. Christians spend too much time trying to make the institutions of our world into churches, when we should be focused instead on instituting the Church in the world. By this I mean bearing the Church’s life, witness, and vocation into the ordinary institutions of creation without asking those institutions to become the Church. The distinction matters because there is only one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church: the body of Christ on earth, gathered by Word and Sacrament, sent in the power of the Spirit, and made one in the life of her Lord. Christian schools, universities, businesses, charities, and civic institutions may be real goods. They may be ordered toward truth, charity, justice, and holiness. They may participate in the work of Christian formation. But they are not the Church, and their Christian faithfulness depends in part on remembering that they are not.

To say this is not to diminish Christian institutions. It is to free them for their proper vocation. A school that tries to be the Church may end up doing neither education nor ecclesial life especially well. The problem is not that these institutions are too Christian, but that they can become Christian in the wrong register. They can begin to imitate the Church’s form while neglecting the Church’s mission.

The first danger is evangelistic. The Church is not merely a safe place for those who already believe; she is the people sent by Christ with Good News for the life of the world. When Christian institutions imagine their faithfulness primarily in terms of separation, they can unintentionally train Christians to think of the world as an interruption to faith rather than the object of God’s redeeming love. Christian education can then become less a preparation for witness and more a refinement of insularity. Its graduates may be well protected, and perhaps even well instructed, but not necessarily well equipped to love, serve, and speak truthfully among those who do not already share their assumptions.

This does not mean that every Christian school should be maximally porous or that every university should abandon the necessary work of guarding its mission. Institutions have real limits, and formation requires boundaries. Children, especially, need protection; students need communities capable of naming falsehood; faculty need freedom to teach from within a coherent account of truth. Christian schools often bear ecclesial weight because families and parishes are not always providing the thick formation Christians rightly desire. But when the response is to make institutional distinctiveness an end in itself, boundaries can become retreat, and formation can produce people whose faith can only survive within a closed environment.

The second danger is sacramental, or perhaps vocational. Here I am drawing substantially on Alexander Schmemann’s account in For the Life of the World, though without attempting to summarize it fully. By a sacramental vision, I do not mean that every human activity becomes a sacrament in the same sense as Baptism and the Eucharist. Rather, I mean that Christians are called to receive the created world as gift and to offer the whole of life back to God. Our ordinary work, study, friendship, administration, making, teaching, and learning are not secular interruptions to spiritual life. They are among the places where human beings exercise the vocation given to us by our Creator and restored in Christ.

When we try to make institutions into churches, we can inadvertently reinforce the very sacred and secular divide we mean to overcome. We imply that an activity becomes truly Christian only when it is wrapped in explicitly ecclesial forms. A classroom is Christian because it resembles catechesis. A campus is Christian because it resembles parish life. But this way of thinking narrows the scope of vocation. It suggests that the ordinary goods of education—disciplined study, intellectual humility, truthful inquiry, patient apprenticeship, skillful teaching, and the formation of judgment—are not sufficiently Christian unless they are made to look like something else.

A more sacramental vision would say nearly the opposite. A Christian school is faithful not by escaping its educational nature, but by receiving the work of education as a creaturely good and offering it to God in truth. A Christian university need not become a chapel with classrooms attached in order to serve Christ. It may serve Christ by pursuing knowledge without idolatry, by forming students who can distinguish wisdom from mere technique, and by teaching its members to see all truth as belonging to God. In this sense, the school’s task is holy because Christ claims education, like every other human vocation, as part of the world he has made and is redeeming.

The third danger is a failure of Kingdom imagination. Christians confess that Jesus is Lord, not merely of religious activity, but of all things. His reign is not confined to sanctuaries, devotional practices, or explicitly Christian organizations. If we make the Church’s visible forms the only places where Christ’s reign is meaningfully acknowledged, we may unintentionally shrink the Kingdom to the boundaries of our own institutions. We may speak as if Christ is King over the Church, while treating the rest of the world as a territory where we can only survive, protest, or withdraw.

The irony is that this is often done in the name of faithfulness. We want institutions that confess Christ’s lordship, and rightly so. But Christ’s lordship over a university does not mean that the university becomes a church. It means that the university is accountable to him as a university. Its governance, curriculum, labor practices, admissions, finances, speech, habits of honor, and pursuit of knowledge must be brought under his rule. The same would be true of a business, a hospital, a household, or a city. The question is whether Christians can inhabit these realms as places that already belong to Christ, without collapsing their distinct purposes into the life of the Church.

The traditional language of Christ as prophet, priest, and king gathers these concerns together. When our institutions become insular, we obscure the Church’s prophetic witness. When ordinary work matters only as it resembles churchly activity, we obscure the priestly character of vocation. When Christ’s lordship is restricted to explicitly Christian spaces, we obscure the scope of his Kingdom.

Christian institutions, then, need not become less Christian. They need to become more properly themselves under Christ. A Christian school should pray, teach Scripture, honor the Church, and encourage its students into the sacramental life of worship. Common prayer, chapel, Scripture instruction, and catechesis can be real gifts. But even an act such as celebrating Communion as an institutional event, however well intended, risks confusion if it suggests that the institution itself can provide what belongs to the Church’s sacramental and pastoral order. A school cannot baptize its students into Christ’s body by institutional culture. It cannot replace the parish, the Table, the font, or the ordinary discipline of belonging to the people of God. At its best, it will point beyond itself to these things. It will teach students that their school is not the circumference of Christian life, but one place where they are formed for a life larger than the school.

This may require a different institutional imagination. Instead of asking whether our schools feel sufficiently like churches, we might ask whether they help Christians inhabit the world truthfully. Do they form students who can love neighbors who do not share their faith? Do they teach literature, biology, mathematics, and history as ways of attending faithfully to reality? Do they treat knowledge as a gift rather than a possession? Do they resist both sectarian fear and secular accommodation? Do they send students more deeply into the actual worshiping life of the Church, rather than absorbing that life into the institution’s own identity?

These questions are more demanding than the question of whether an institution appears sufficiently church-like. They require theological clarity, institutional humility, and confidence that Christ is not absent from the world into which he sends his people. They also require us to trust the Church to be the Church: the body gathered and sent, nourished by Word and Sacrament, bearing witness to the crucified and risen Lord. No school or university can take her place. Nor should it try.

The task before Christian institutions is therefore not to become alternate churches, but to become faithful servants of the Church’s mission in the world. They can teach, heal, administer, cultivate, research, build, shelter, and form. They can order their common life toward truth and charity. They can resist the false neutrality of a world that pretends not to worship. But they do these things best when they know what they are and what they are not.

There is one Church, and she belongs to Christ. Precisely because that is true, Christians are free to enter every other institution without needing it to become the Church in miniature. We may instead bear the Church’s life into the world: proclaiming Good News, offering our vocations to God, and acknowledging the reign of Christ over all things. That is not a diminished vision of Christian institutional life. It is, I think, a larger and more hopeful one.