The Spirit of Community: the Power of the Sacraments in The Christian Community

By Ulrich Meier and Matthias van Alstein

A thoughtful exploration of the seven sacraments of The Christian Community from an experienced priest, revealing how a stronger community connection can be formed through common worship.

Modern society places great emphasis on the individual as a dynamic, creative force, free to pursue their own goals and ambitions. Despite this, people still long to be part of a community and form meaningful relationships with other human beings. One of the places this deeper connection can be found is in common worship.

In this thoughtful book, Ulrich Meier shows how each of the seven sacraments of The Christian Community contributes to community building. For instance, he explores how, through baptism, the community welcomes a new life on earth, aware of the life that was lived in spirit before birth; confirmation marks the transition from the close ties of parents and teachers to a wider community; and in sacramental consultation, individuals explore the relationship of their past actions to their future intentions.

This book is for people who wish to deepen their understanding of the sacraments, and help to build a more vibrant church community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Floris Books
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781782509011

Book preview

Introduction

A person becomes a Christian not through family tradition or membership of a church, but through personal experience and conviction. Sacramental life in Christian congregations is nowadays founded on the free participation of their members, motivated by their inner resolve and the quest for life’s transformation. The present volume seeks to show how the seven Christian sacraments can form the basis and provide inspiration for building a diverse community.

Declining traditions and a new openness

The importance of Christian tradition and ecclesiastical life has markedly declined over the past fifty years, along with basic knowledge of the Bible and Christian festivals. Although we might regard this as a regrettable loss of Christian culture, the decline in traditional religious observance has also meant the disappearance of all kinds of misunderstandings and aberrations that developed over the long history of Christianity.

Educators of a former era often cited an all-seeing divine power to strengthen their own weak authority and compel ‘moral conduct’ in their charges, but few would resort to such a view of God today. Yet at the same time, in my experience, children and adolescents relate to Christian stories and religious experiences with an astonishing degree of openness, being less hampered by pre-existing modes of thought and speech that might otherwise erect a barrier to them. And parents no longer feel the need to pass on their own rejection of religion either – they are more open-minded towards questions of faith and see them as a self-evident topic of discussion.

While the radical atheism that has emerged in public discourse, especially since the events of September 11, 2001, sees every kind of religious conviction as the root of terrorism and warmongering, on the other hand there are authors with a surprisingly open and unprejudiced view of religion. I would like to cite two examples.

The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, having honed his thinking through engagement with modern philosophy, rediscovered religion and Christianity anew. A former atheist, he was converted to ‘absence-theism’¹ and from then on celebrated the ‘unfinished’ nature of Christianity, which he discerns among other things in its ‘absent’ but nevertheless promised God. And in 2019, the journalist Evelyn Finger, chief editor of the ‘Beliefs and Doubts’ section of the weekly paper Die Zeit, wrote as follows in its Easter issue under the heading ‘Cross and Church’:

What is this Cross in reality? Certainly not a threatening symbol but rather the sign of a defeat: God becomes human and amongst humankind he underwent the worst imaginable suffering … Only after this does the bright moment of resurrection come. Jesus’ earthly defeat inexplicably transforms itself into something super-earthly. Into a hope. Into a promise of redemption. We can believe this or not. But what follows from it for the Church’s relationship with the world? First of all this: that it stands, with its message, at the threshold between a profane and a sacred realm; that the Church is in the world, but is not of this world.

A new religious community culture

These few sentences already point to a new kind of discourse that seems vital to me for seeking religious renewal in the way The Christian Community does: any tone of paternalism or of knowing better than others will close off rather than open gateways. This does not mean that Christian teachings should be in some way diluted or relativised. What matters above all is the intention with which they are offered. In the second example above this becomes discernible in the simple statement, ‘We can believe this or not.’ This phrase should not be misunderstood as an expression of indifference or disinterest; rather it should be taken as an indication that we are indeed free to explore, or not, the contents of faith as we wish.

It also seems to me that any productive discussion between Christians relies upon them relinquishing all attempts to establish a ‘valid’ or ultimate explanation of Christian belief. We must be willing to live with perplexity and astonishment at things that are fundamentally inexplicable – such as the indwelling of God in a human being or the overcoming of death at the resurrection. In the twenty-first century it can no longer be a question of whether knowledge is superior to belief or