A friend recently posted an article about Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams that got me thinking. The gist of the article is essentially that Williams’ struggle to maintain unity within the Anglican communion stem from his profound view that church is community and that community overrides all else, including and especially the myth and exercise of individual power.

I believe a high Ecclesiology such as Williams had cannot be held without a high Christology, the thing is both of these perspectives are necessarily iconoclastic to worldly structures…I do not believe that a tension between these needs to be maintained…I believe the worldly needs to submit itself to Ecclesiology/Christology – every time…and that’s ultimately the problem – it is not in the world’s nature to submit.

So with the nature of the world the way it is and the nature of the church the way it is (should be) one should expect tension between the two. What happens however is that when the church co-opts worldly structures (as it sometimes necessarily must being a beachhead of the kingdom of God in the world) it brings that tension within the body itself.

While this cannot be helped because the church is in the world and the world is, by definition, worldly, it means that church must know itself that much more to resist the temptation to allow worldly strategies to win out in the end when tension arises.

Ultimately the principles of community and faith in spirit-led unity must override individualistic desires even when they seem to be the most sound from a worldly management perspective. As the article I read so eloquently expressed this belief which is held by Williams “it is the community, not the autonomous individual, that has access to truth”.

To put it another way – it is the community that is the reflection of and embodiment of the living Christ, not the autonomous individual.

This makes it difficult to be an autonomous Christian for it is somewhat of an oxymoron no matter how popular the idea is. The image of the Christian unbound from the strict constraints of a church and free to express their Godly nature through a union with the “invisible” church is more of a rationalization for individualism.

As Joseph Ratzinger recently wrote in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: from the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection “The invisible unity of the community is not sufficient.” It is not sufficient because unity is one of the key tools of evangelism Christ identified; the visible unity of the church is a critical witness to the power of God at work in the world.

What the average isolated Christian sadly fails to see is that the church they no longer like, no longer wish to be united with, is more likely a shell of itself that has become a wholly worldly community centre built upon modernist management principles. Rather than abandon it the duty of the follower is to work as a redeeming tool in God’s hand to reshape and reform it along the principles of patient, prayerful community.

By patient I mean humbly submitting to the possibility that the change one works for may not happen in one’s lifetime. This is difficult for the average Christian to accept having been raised in a culture of instant gratification where one gets what one wants immediately or one moves on.

It is not simply the individual that struggles here but the community as well and by community I mean the few chosen to lead, who no longer generally seek the will of the body so much as act on its behalf. This kind of community is as impatient as the prodigal Christian in that it often fails to recognize or abide the reality that change in the individual can take just as long.

Facing the long, slow reality of gradual Godly transformation the body will often cast out or allow the prodigal to cast themselves out (“emerge”) as the easier of the two options.

All this to say that both church as a whole and individual Christians could benefit from a deep and high Ecclesiology and Christology for the sake of reforming the body into what Christ continues to anticipate.