My German classics professor, trying to explain to us how a verb in Greek could have two apparently opposite meanings, put it ever so succinctly: “‘Ja,’ it means go and it means come. It’s the same thing!”
It wasn’t obvious at the time, but I gradually learned that opposites often have a common linguistic root.
I raise this as an introduction to the word “member,” the root of the word membership, which is a common thread throughout this issue.
Member comes from the Sanskrit for flesh. Its root meaning is more strongly conveyed by the word membrane. At a glance, they appear to be opposites: Membrane is a whole covering; member is just part of a whole, an individual.
Common root. Whole and part. But member has an inherent sense of the whole that the individual is part of.
Which brings us to the question of church membership explored in this month’s cover story on page 31 by Will Ingram and Matthew Ruttan. It’s a question that has come before General Assemblies. But assemblies are legislative sessions and free-ranging discussions are difficult in that setting.
We hope that raising the matter in the Record might provoke an interesting and informed discussion about what membership in the church might look like in the future.
Part of the discussion is bound to involve questions about what, if anything, a person has to subscribe to become a member of the church. To traditionalists this may seem an odd remark: membership necessarily involves agreeing to the fundamentals of the organization.
In the postmodern world, however, what even constitutes fundamentals is up for questioning. Two of the church’s academic thinkers, Joe McLelland and John Vissers, take this up in the latest installment of our Theology 101 series.
Postmodern philosopher McLelland takes a slightly different approach than theologian Vissers, but it is not about agreeing with John as opposed to Joe, or vice versa.
In fact, I would encourage those who find themselves inclined more to one author than the other after reading both to take a day or two and then re-read the author they are less inclined to.
Because it’s only by wrestling with the difficult points made by someone who sees the world a little differently, that any of us is challenged and grows.
So what does it mean to be a member of the Presbyterian Church in Canada? Even more fundamentally, what does it mean to be a Christian?
This may seem obvious to those who have lived within the church community most or all of their lives, but it is a deep and perplexing question for many others today.
Whether we like it or even believe it, we live in a postmodern age in Canada. In simple terms, postmodernism is a way of describing current attitudes that question institutions and their underlying certainties.
This fundamental questioning about whether truth has any objectivity or universality is one of the reasons people no longer go to church.
But it is emphatically not – as too often suggested – a turning away from God. Far from it. Most Canadians still believe in God. The questions are what do they believe about God, whom do they trust to talk about God with, and where can they encounter God? Increasingly, the answer for the latter two questions has been: “not in church.”
Instead of creating more or different membership rules, perhaps we should focus on creating conditions where people can encounter God – creating those “thin spaces” that St. Columba identified on Iona, (see p. 23).
Because while God is not completely obscure – He has shown us His face and more in the person of Jesus – at least in our earthly life, bounded by time and space, much about the divine life and purpose does remain hidden, a mystery.
It is only in the next life that we are promised that we shall see God “face to face.”
So perhaps that is what it really means to be a member of the church; it is to recognize that although we are individuals, we are all united by the divine membrane of love.
