Don't Think Twice, Its Alright: The love for the assembly

The gearing up for General Convention is also the wind down of my term on Executive Council, the wind down my work in the institutional church, and a kind of freedom to look again at how I have spent my years in ministry and where to go from here.

Contrary to the belief of some who read this blog, I love the Church very much. Indeed I have loved the Church to the point of sometimes confusing the integrity of its life as community and its life as assembly. 

I have spent a great deal of time dealing with the Church as assembly, as ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) all the while believing that working with the christian assembly was a way to ultimately serve the church as beloved community, as koinonia (κοινωνία).  

I didn't go into this work blind, indeed in Seminary and afterwords in my first ministries as missionary overseas and missionary in the US, (campus ministry) it was stressed again and again by classmates that one of the first questions we needed to ask was if to Gospel was served by serving the Church - since the church itself was a fit subject for transformation by the Gospel and subject to all the proclivities of the flesh. The question was, and is, can that transformation be worked from within?

Can the assembly, with its institutional needs (even Common Prayer is an institutional need), ever free itself from institutional protectionism enough to be the place where the beloved community gathers and thrives?

Well, yes, if you believe (as I did and often do now) that every meeting of the assembly is local, and limited enough to where a community of loving care can be formed in its midst.  I believe that General Convention, Executive Council, the Presiding Bishop's Council of Advice, the Diocesan Council in Delaware, the Diocesan Convention, the local church, the vestry and on and on, are all local, all a place where a community of loving care can form.  But each of these assemblies, in the various forms of their institutional grandeur, can exhibit characteristics of what a good friend and prophet calls, "a brood of vipers." 

This is because every church assembly, every ekklesia, has institutionalized matters of spiritual health and loving kindness and has offered those cloaked in proper dress and occasionally silly pomp. And worse, every ekklesia is burdened with the care of money and power, and the worldly wisdom that goes along with it.

I have just spent the last few days with a community of people who, as koinonia, are worthy of God's love and capable of showing that love in community. Executive Council is a wonderful and talented group of people. At the same time Executive Council is caught up in all the foibles of regulatory agencies, boards, supervisors, etc. It is a place of negotiation, compromise, and small gains. The people are capable of great dreams, but the institutional life we lead grinds those dreams down to small threads of hope.

Now back home I realize just how much the life of the Church as institution has cost, cost me and I believe cost all who are part not only of Executive Council, but also Diocesan Councils, Standing Committees, Vestries, etc.  The Church we believe in, as in "We believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church" is not the institutional Church, an entity bound by all the sins of humankind, but the koinonia church that is the localized gathering of the faithful.

Of course the two churches are inseparable - the koinonia always begets assembly - but they are not the same. I use the church institutional and it uses me, but in our better moments we use the church institutional to the end that a community of loving kindness, a koinonia, can thrive. But too much of the assembly church can cause any thriving to wilt, any joy to be turned to despair.

And so it is that I returned from Executive Council with the strong feeling that I had misplaced my love - my love of the Church as a community of loving kindness had been overtaken by my love of the Church as assembly.  And now I wonder if time spent working on making the assembly a body in which the spirit can thrive was a waste.  I don't know. 

But I do know that running around in my head is the Bob Dylan song, "Don't think Twice, its Alright" as sung by Ramblin' Jack Elliot. The words are these:

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don’t matter, anyhow
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
I can’t hear you anymore
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

Oh, I know, there's all sorts of problems with identifying the Church as a woman, much less singing good ol' Dylan and identifying what he was saying about love and love of church.  I know, I know. Still, there it is. 

The question, of course, is at the end of the song -

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

And I am left with the question... did it just waste my precious time?  Well, don't think twice, it's alright.

Here is Ramblin' Jack Elliot singing: