Why the Local Church Should Be Your Village

In the early days of social media, I came across a bio that still haunts me: “I am me and that has nothing to do with you.” It’s an apt summary of a common view today—namely, that the integrity of your identity is predicated on a strong sense of independence. Traditional markers—family, place, and faith—are excluded on general principle. Such things identify you as a creature, a contingent being in a world you didn’t make. A salient factor here would be the absence of personal choice in all three. In infancy, you don’t choose your family, place, or place of worship. Our earliest years are, among other things, a time of total dependency. All we can do is receive. Our life is circumscribed by givens.

“I am me and that has nothing to do with you” inherits a romantic view of personhood that, in America, finds its most eloquent exponent in Ralph Waldo Emerson. It’s in his book, Nature (1836), in particular, that we encounter his clearest picture of identity on these terms: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity—leaving me my eyes, which nature cannot repair.” If we want to find our true selves, says Emerson, we must leave society behind, along with all of its moribund institutions, and enter into the primitive laboratory of nature. Here and only here, all of the accidents of birth and society fall away and the true self is revealed. Emerson argues that the process of self-making happens best away from others and off in the woods. Notice how this is a major trope in many of our stories. Think of all the movies that present us with some kind of regular Joe or Jane type who must discover who they truly are by embarking on a journey into the wild.

Not so long ago, however, if you wanted to know who someone was, they would give an answer along the lines of family, place, and faith. In my case, “I am the son of Stuart of Lawrenceville, and we worship at Restoration.” If someone pressed me at this point and said, “No, no, no. Tell me who you really are,” the request would have been met with puzzlement.

It’s worth noting here that Emerson’s view is, historically speaking, both novel and alien. Down the ages, identity has been understood in terms of God (or gods), family, and place. In contrast to being made by the woods, this vision argues that we’re made by the village. A poetic counterpoint to the Emersonian vision of the woods comes to us from Goethe. Speaking of his artistic achievements, he says

“Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts, . . . their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.”

Though this is the more historically prevalent view, because we’re modern people, it’s also liable to strike us as rather remote. While it’s easy to think of contemporary stories that present us with characters discovering themselves in the wild, it’s harder to think of recent stories that give us characters who must return to the village in order to find themselves. Some recent exceptions crop up in the fiction of Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson. Interestingly, this scenario, when it does turn up in popular culture, tends to be presented in negative terms. A film like Ari Aster’s Hereditary is a dark version of the heroine discovering herself by going back to the village. Unfortunately, for her, the village involves a family curse.

It’s no surprise that Americans tend to believe that we’re made by the woods instead of the village. In an important sense, America began as a radical journey into the wilderness. The Puritan scholar Perry Miller termed this the “errand into the wilderness.” The pilgrims and early settlers undertook what they believed to be a radical spiritual journey into a vast wilderness where they could work out their true religion and pursue an authentic vision of life, liberty, and happiness. Little wonder that their vision of the woods has shaped our cultural imagination.

As enticing as it is, Emerson’s romantic picture of the self doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. From family and friends to teachers and schoolyard bullies to annoying neighbors and co-workers, we are all, like Goethe, collective beings who happen to bear our particular names. People form and shape us, for better or for worse. The Emerson who strolled into the woods was a Harvard-educated man with the needed resources to do so—not some noble savage awaiting his primitive rebirth.

This reality doesn’t stop plenty of people from running with Emerson’s romantic view of the self, of course. But for those who confront the problem, the deficiencies of the woods-shaping view of identity can’t be unseen. We are made by the village, whether we like it or not. So if it’s really that simple, why are we still tying ourselves in knots over identity? Well, today a big part of the problem is what we’ve done to the village. Stated in simple terms, we’ve tried to make the village more hospitable to our hyper-individualistic sensibilities by vastly expanding it.

In 1962, Marshall McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy, the book in which he coined the phrase “global village” to describe an electronically connected world. His prophetic insight is astonishing, and the “very online” world in which we now live more than realizes his prediction. Global village is, as McLuhan intended, a rather paradoxical phrase—some might go further and say that it’s an outright contradiction. By definition, a village is small, parochial, rooted in a very specific place and time and populated by a very specific people. As such, it’s also circumscribed by a particular set of laws, customs, and traditions, many of which are necessarily peculiar to this particular place. An Australian town may have road signs warning of kangaroos crossing. These same signs wouldn’t make much sense in Atlanta, Georgia.

In sharp contrast, the ambition of the global village is to erase traditional borders and boundaries and to do away with local customs and traditions. Think of the warm intentions behind the good old “coexist” bumper sticker. It’s possible to bring these different religions and systems of thought together in some kind of harmony only by undermining or erasing their essential differences. Similar problems hold true for the philosophy behind the European Union. Tensions continue to erupt whenever individual nations want to hold onto their own customs and cultural norms. You can be whatever you want to be in the global village so long as it doesn’t inhibit someone else’s self-expression. And here we discover the only true binding religion of the global village, namely, the neo-liberal political order that takes individual autonomy to be the highest personal good. Any laws or customs that undermine this view of free expression are anathema in the digitally constituted global village. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Satanism—all are fine, so long as they avoid any public truth claims. In the global village, you can’t say “Jesus is Lord,” but you can say, “I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.”

As arresting as McLuhan’s phrase is, the words global and village remain opposed, all of our connectivity notwithstanding. Ostensibly devoted to a celebration of diversity, the global village fails precisely because it fails to honor true differences. We’re not all the same and the differences do indeed make a difference. What is needed is a more capacious vision, one that holds individuality and community in proper tension, uniting both with a telos that transcends human limitations. Consider the local church.

You wake up bleary-eyed and stagger to the coffee pot. The weekend is almost over and you’re running behind as usual. Piles of laundry still need your attention, and you groan as you look at all the junk in your garage and all of the leaves in your driveway. Not to be dramatic, but there are a million things you could—should—be doing before Monday barrels into the picture. The “Sunday scaries” are here.

But, no, you have to choke down your coffee and wrestle your kids into presentable clothes and climb into the car where, let’s face it, you’ll all probably fight for the entire ride. All this so you can go to church and endure more bad coffee, stilted conversations, and fight a sometimes losing battle to not scroll on your phone during the sermon. Sorry, Pastor.

Is this really how I want to end this essay—not with a bang, but with a whimper, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot? More importantly, is this frail community of cantankerous people that gathers every Sunday morning really the answer to the colossal challenges of identity and community in the late modern world? I’ve painted an aggressively non-idealistic portrait of Sunday morning to assure you that we all inhabit the same planet. I’m under no delusions that going to church is some kind of rhapsodic experience for most of us.

One of the less remarked upon challenges to the local church is idealism. We all give lip service to sayings like “there’s no perfect church,” but the reality is more sobering. Churches are filled with fallen people—earthen vessels, to use the apostle Paul’s phrase. For this reason, churches face idolatry and cultural capitulation, painful splits, moral failure among the leadership and the laity, all manner of abuse, cowardice in the face of injustice, and complicity with corrupt political orders. The list could go on, but for some the foregoing is more than enough to discredit the church and her prophetic witness. After all, isn’t Christianity supposed to transform its adherents?

When these kinds of charges are leveled against local congregations, I think of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Though AA has an explicitly Christian origin story, the organization has largely jettisoned most of its scriptural language. Instead of praying to Jesus, for instance, members must acknowledge their “higher power.” Many people have written about the confounding effectiveness of AA, but to my mind, few come close to the profound reflections of the late novelist, David Foster Wallace. At the center of Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a halfway house run by a gentleman named Don Gately. Wallace argued that couching his narrative in a place filled with addicts was a framing device that allowed him to “talk about God with a straight face.” He wanted to write a story with the moral seriousness of a Dostoevsky novel, but he was acutely aware of the jaded sensibilities of his late modern audience.

What does any of this have to do with the accusations against the church? The philosophy of AA is predicated on the assumption that we can’t save ourselves—that both our free choices and our desires are part of the problem. We need help and more urgently, we need a Savior. All of our best thinking got us into all of the various disasters that fill our lives. Dallas Willard used to say that church ought to begin with people saying, “I’m so-and-so, and I’m a recovering sinner.”

A healthy church is filled with recovering sinners who recognize their need for Christ and who work together to cooperate with his Holy Spirit so that they can lead lives of obedience to him. To the degree that a local congregation is committed to this aim, it will be a faithful house of worship. As Wallace said of AA, the confounding fact is that it works. Getting on your knees, worshiping the Lord in spirit and truth—even when you hate the particular song that morning—and taking communion changes us, refines our hearts and minds, and prepares us to be transformative presences wherever we find ourselves.

Not everyone makes it through AA, of course. Some wander away, much to their detriment. Others relapse, but stagger back. It’s the same with the church. Recovering sinners are prone to wander, prone to relapse, and prone to losing the battle with sin. Invariably, they lose when they try to go it alone. The picture we see of the church right now reflects this complex reality. It always has.

A few words of caution. Though its failures are manifest, the global village remains seductive. It’s easy to single out large churches with attractional models, but the siren call of the global village comes to every local congregation. It shows up whenever we’re tempted to tailor messages for a “global” audience rather than the people in the room. It shows up when we’re tempted to chase after fads and fashions in the name of relevance rather than attending to God’s word and teaching obedience to Christ. It shows up when we try to soft-peddle passages of scripture that clash with our modern sensibilities. It shows up when we succumb to a celebrity mindset and put too much stock in one particular figure or movement.

Jesus said that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church. If the church were a solely human institution, it would’ve gone to hell in a handbasket a long time ago. But by God’s grace, the church is still here, thanks not to us, but to him. And it’s still shaping those who come to it willing to receive their identities from the one who made them and set them in a particular time and place.

Image Credit: William Shayer “The Half Way House, Thatcham” (1848)