So, what would “repurposing” the church look like? Well, the first step would need to be recognizing that this IS the question that hast to be answered. Normally, we accept the church as a given. In other words, we assume we know what the church should be doing and then ask how the church can be doing whatever that is better. What I’m saying is that “that” is the problem. In fact, we don’t know what the church should be doing, or whether it should be doing anything at all.

“Church Christianity” became formalized in the 4^th century when it was made the official religion of the Roman empire. Church-based Christianity was a religion of salvation. How did one acquire salvation? Not by following the simple formula of Paul in Acts 16, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” Salvation now was handed out by the church through the sacraments, which were reserved for those who had joined the church through baptism.

Reading the gospels, however, it’s hard to find support for any of this. The word “church” only appears twice (almost certainly put in Jesus’ mouth by Matthew). More importantly, Jesus simply shows little interest in formal religion and certainly gives no indication he planned for a religion in his name to follow him.

The notion that any religion, through its rites and designated authorities, could distribute salvation seems to have been what most infuriated Jesus about the Judaism of his day. In the gospels, Jewish authorities are horrified the way Jesus announces forgiveness and salvation to anyone and everyone, freely and without authorization. Jesus declares “You’re forgiven, and you’re forgiven, and you’re forgiven,” the way Oprah announced the audience prizes on her TV show.

Jesus’ identity seems to have been primarily as a teacher/rabbi and a miraculous healer. His teaching centered on finding, recognizing, and experiencing what he called the kingdom of God. Jesus did not say, even as some later New Testament writers interpreted him saying and the church has normally taught, that this kingdom was something that was coming down the road. Rather, for Jesus the kingdom of God, which is the presence of God, is here now.

The healings Jesus performed were demonstrations of this. Regardless of how literally you view them, as told in the gospels they are signs of the kingdom’s presence. This is why pronouncements of forgiveness and salvation often accompany them. In a story that oddly reverses the expected order (Mark 2), a paralytic is lowered on a mat through the roof of the building where Jesus is teaching. Seeing this, he looks up and declares the man’s sins forgiven. Only when his authority to do this is questioned, does Jesus heal the man.

Jesus’ casting out of demons (which I categorize as healings) also illustrate the idea of the kingdom being present. The demons, in fact, are the ones who recognize Jesus’ divine identity. On one occasion, Jesus is accused of using evil spirits in his exorcisms. He rejects this and says, “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12).

As was typical of an itinerant rabbi, Jesus had disciples, some of whom traveled with him. The gospels give no indication, however, that Jesus attempted to create individual communities of such followers. Jesus’ intention is perhaps shown in the startling story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5). After being freed of his demons, the man wants to follow Jesus, i.e. become a disciple. But Jesus says no, he should return home and tell “his own people” what God has done for him.

At its most basic, the “purpose” of the church has been understood as continuing Jesus’ mission. Early on this was understood quite literally, as when Paul tells the Christians in Corinth, “You are the body of Christ.” Fairly quickly, however, that notion was applied to the institutional church, which then became the official representative of Christ in the world. But there was no justification for such a maneuver, either in Paul or in the teachings of Jesus.

What, then, was Jesus’ mission that his followers should continue? To experience and witness to the kingdom, the presence of God in the world. This can be found in gospels and in Paul, but the early church detoured into an apocalyptic mission, with the kingdom proclaimed as something to come very soon. When that didn’t happen, it became something to come “someday.”

What is now clear, however, is that this viewpoint was never unanimous in the church. There were early Christians who understood Jesus and his message very differently. The best example is the gospel of Thomas, where Jesus explicitly rejects the notion that God’s kingdom is something to be expected in the future, near or distant.

“[The kingdom] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.” (Thomas 113)

Jesus’ mission was to help people “see” the kingdom of God that was all around them and within them. And if the church has a purpose today, that’s it. Now “kingdom” language doesn’t really work anymore, and it’s even debatable how useful the word “God” is today. Depending on people’s experience, they can easily miscommunicate and cause more confusion than genuine understanding.

But what must be understood is that experience is the objective, not words and intellectual understanding, which the church has had more than enough of. It forgot that words are simply pointers to a reality that is beyond words and beyond ideas. The spiritual journey leads to knowing God, not knowing about God.

The conflict between these dueling views of religion is found throughout the Bible. It’s at the heart of the story of Adam and Eve and the message of the prophets. It is what got Jesus killed. Yet it is always clear that it is in knowing God that we find life and true happiness, not in rituals, beliefs, or organizational membership.

In knowing God, the world’s spiritual traditions say, we also come to know who we really are. Our being is an expression of the One Being that undergirds all reality. As the creation story in Genesis 2 poetically says, God’s own breath, the Spirit, fills our lungs and gives us life. We are all one with God, our origin, or “father” as Jesus says.

Our ignorance of this truth is the source of our misery, individually and collectively. We are lost in the blindness, ignorance, confusion, and fear of our egoic selves. Our ego is simply the endless string of stories we tell ourselves, or that others have told us. In them we think we find our identity but they are forever changing. As Thomas Merton says, we now wear one mask, and then another. So, we are forever trying to find or create our “real” selves when, in fact, our true Self has been a given from the beginning. “Salvation” (to use the biblical word) is awakening to, and truly seeing, this truth: our oneness with God, our source and origin, the ground of being itself.

How do we come to know God? There is no formula. It is a unique experience for every person. Yet there are guides and pointers in thousands of years of spiritual tradition from around the world. Such wisdom can be found in all the world’s religions. It can be found in the Bible, including the teachings of Jesus, once we know to look for it. Yet it isn’t about “belonging” to any religion but listening to a voice that speaks through them.

This is where a repurposed church will have to eat some humble pie. It will not only need to acknowledge that it has misrepresented Jesus for two millennia but also misrepresented the other religions of the world. Neither Jesus nor the church is the hope and salvation of the world. No religion or prophet is. But wisdom and truth can be found in all of them, as well as more than a little nonsense.

The purpose of a repurposed church will be as a part, and only a part, of this ancient and global quest to know God and to know our true nature and identity. Is a church necessary for this? No, not necessary. Which is why the “spiritual but not religious” trend will continue and thrive. But especially for those coming out of the church tradition, it may seem desirable to join together in this quest. Yet it will be acknowledged that there are many outside religion, or participants in other religions, who are equal partners in this journey of discovery.

To some, this will seem quite a comedown from the church’s previous mission of “saving” the world. Yet we’ve all seen how that has worked out. “But what about poverty, hunger, ignorance, war, and injustice?” some may ask. What about peace on earth and an eternal hope?

The wisdom of the world’s spiritual traditions, and the experience of history, teaches that when the ego pursues such things, disaster is the ultimate result. The ego’s attempts (alone or in the millions) to create the kingdom of God on earth are all, as Jesus says, cases of the blind leading the blind, with all falling together into the pit.

But when we awaken to our true identity, we naturally “love our neighbor as ourselves” because we recognize that our neighbor is just another manifestation of our true self. As Paul says in terms of the gospel, there is no separation between us because we are all “one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3). We see that we are all equal parts of the human family and of the whole creation.

And to be awakened to our oneness with God is to know eternal life now. It is to know that, in fact, there is only this Eternal Now, and that past and future exist only in the ego’s fevered imagination. Our eternal hope is to know our timeless nature already.

A repurposed church would be a place facilitating the discovery and experience of the kingdom of God. It would be a community of people supporting each other in their journeys of both knowing God and their true nature. Together they would explore life as being rather than endless striving and doing, of being truly present in the here and now, and being forever grounded in “the peace that surpasses all understanding.”

 

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