Losing the Church

What does it mean to lose the Church? What does it mean to have the Church taken away from you? We live in a society which believes the church belongs to us. Our parents started the church. Our ancestors built the church. Parish councils over the years hire and fire clergy. With such a strong sense of ownership, how can we ever lose the Church?

The Lord said to the Jews who had come to him: “I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it. And he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but when it falls on any one, it will crush him.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. But when they tried to arrest him, they feared the multitudes, because they held him to be a prophet.

Matthew 21.43-46

I am completing my thirtieth year of ministry in the Church. I have worked in four very different communities in four different states. One thing has always been the same. The people in the Church ‘come and go’ through time.

Whether it is through migration, funerals or even apostacy, the people sitting in the pews today will not be the people sitting in the pews in the next generation. Clergy come and go. Hierarchs come and go. Only one thing remains unchanged in any church.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. It doesn’t matter who is sitting in the pews or serving on parish council, Jesus Christ owns the Church. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we will be able to ‘get on’ with our journey to heaven.

When we spend our energy consumed with who owns the church, we waste valuable time. Time that can and should be spent in prayer and repentance is ‘taken up’ by secret meetings and agendas. Rather than serving others, we seek ways to get rid of others.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the religious elites, the ones who believed they owned the church, revolted against Christ and lost. Christ is the corner stone which crushed them in their rebellion. The elites couldn’t handle the idea of someone else in charge.

The question we should be asking ourselves is this. What will it take to hold on to the Church? If we don’t want the Church to be taken away, we must produce fruits. The Church produces fruit by growing and expanding. If your Church is the same size today, with the same members today, as yesterday, it is not growing and producing fruit.

How many new Orthodox Churches have opened in your city in the past generation? I’m not talking about new buildings for existing Churches. I’m talking about totally new communities. A ‘fruit’ is something that God uses to create something new.

The fruit of the Church is you and me, the people. We can either be fertile and plant the seed of the Church in the hearts of others, or we can fall to the grow and rot, useless to anyone. This may hurt to hear. It surely hurt the chief priests and Pharisees to hear.

Hearing painful news isn’t the end, but the beginning of healing. It hurts when the doctor says you are sick, but then you can focus on healing. A patient that focuses too much on the pain of the diagnosis will not focus on the cure.

The best way to plant the seed of the Church in others is first and foremost to love being in the Church. If the Church is a burden to you, your seed will be rotten and useless. If you leave a rotten fruit with other fruit, the rot spreads. Rather than new life, the old life also passes away and we lose the Church.

You may want to think that today’s Gospel lesson was just about the Jews losing the Church. Saint Paul addresses that when he said, “For if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either.” (Romans 11.21)

Just because we have the Church today, doesn’t mean that God cannot or won’t take it away from us and give it to someone else. He did it before, and He can do it again. Just because our ancestors built the Church is no guarantee that we cannot lose it. We don’t own the Church; God owns the Church.