Congregations: An Art School for the Soul

We were out to find Gabriel a gift for his sixth birthday. The girls suggested we stop by an art store near the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where we lived at the time.

As we browsed, I was impressed with the spirit of the young people, students back to school, their hearts overflowing with creative intent. Every tube of paint, colored chalk, each luxuriously rich, thick sheet of paper — all of it crammed into a tiny space, barely enough room for two people to walk side-by-side — seemed to announce that the human imagination was alive and well in this place.

We also saw art students, in the fever of creative expression, who carried their canvases and were, in turn, marked by the color, the action, the spectral figurations that spilled or splattered beyond the boundaries, making the painter the painted.

It's not a bad metaphor for the church — the painter, the painted. It's often said that the church is not a building but a people. True. But what are these people about? Or what is being imagined into a living organism? Are congregations a form of topiarius, the Latin from which we get topiary, a way of shaping a living thing into a peculiar place, a strange sort of "somewhere else" in an otherwise flat and statistically predictable world?

"'Christian congregations took me by surprise,'" wrote James Hopewell, author of Congregations: Stories and Structures (1988). He came to a startling realization that congregations are something beyond their structures and dogmas — a congregation, he wrote, is a work of living art, brought about by "'persistent imaginative construction of its members'" (3). According to Hopewell, "'a plain church on a pale day catches one in a deep current of narrative interpretation and representation by which people give sense and order to their lives'" (5).[i] 

Another suggestion in this key is the notion that congregational life is simultaneously situated and "somewhere else" — meaning that language about God, reconciliation, repair, healing exists as a kind of counternarrative at the far edge of what we take as given, what is possible for us to say, and ventures into the unspeakable.

We see this in Lamentations, a series of five acrostic poems that carry the extreme grieving of the people of Jerusalem after its fall in 586 BCE. The poet reaches for words: "How lonely sits the city . . . how like a widow" (1:1); "How humiliated" (2:1); "what can I say for you, to what compare you?" (2:13); "how the gold has grown dim" (4:1). But in extremity of this condition, it also introduces the "strange language" of hope: "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him'" (3:22-24) — this strange word exists not as the "forward" destination towards which the poem drives, insisting on resolution to suffering or question (the poem ends anxiously and with a question (5:19-22)), but rather enables truthful testimony to shine steadily among the "fallen things" of this age. Lamentations 3:22-24 inspired Great is Thy Faithfulness. It exists almost as a commonplace in congregational memory, feeling too chirpy for this world, until one recognises that its language was born in extremity.

Pastors know this — that explanations fail us but songs, and the poems within them, often offer a salve that speaks a strange word of steadfast love and faithfulness: "Morning by morning, new mercies I see" rings truest in the depths. But it's not a bad idea to practice it, to learn it as if it were a quiet reminder, near at hand.

Our day at the art store felt more reliable than the one recounted in Lamentations or, for that matter, the world today. Of course, we had our worries. Some were more significant than others — some we did not yet imagine. But there's another imagination at work in us. The girls settled on a great big pad of newspaper print and a brand-new box of crayons for Gabriel’s birthday gift. We paid our money at the cashier.  I don't recall what they did with their materials. Perhaps they were making a world, a world that doesn't always promise "what's on the tin" — and, at the same time, maybe they were also being "fearfully and wonderfully" made.

[i] James Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structures (1988), quoted in Heather Walton, "Poetics" in Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology (Chichester:Blackwell Publishing, LTD, 2012), 3, 5.