When Another Christian Cannot See the Point 

The County Ecumenical Officer on a conversation about church buildings, and what it asks of us when another tradition cannot see what we see

9-Minute Read

Some weeks ago I had a pleasant but earnest discussion with a pastor about church buildings. His position was straightforward. Owning buildings had become, in his view, a burden his tradition would be better off without. Insurance, heating, repairs, fundraising, and committees consumed money, time, and attention that could be better used elsewhere. Christians, after all, can meet perfectly well in homes or whatever other space serves the purpose. This opinion is not uncommon among other church leaders and some ecumenical officers.

Personally, I did not find his viewpoint in any way objectionable or unreasonable. Even so, I would like to say that I listened with the attention I have often commended to others in my reflections, but I did not. Almost immediately, I found myself explaining what he was saying in terms of our different traditions. His tradition does not share my understanding of sacred space or consecrated buildings, I thought, so naturally he sees this as a practical rather than a theological question. Within about ninety seconds I had put his argument safely into a box, and the conversation moved on.

It is the speed with which I did so that has stayed with me.

Earlier this month I published a reflection called Learning the Grammar of Ecumenical Encounter. In it, I drew together some of the philosophers who have accompanied many of my ecumenical reflections: Thomas Reid on testimony, Iris Murdoch on attention, Emmanuel Levinas on the face of the other and Hannah Arendt on new beginnings - natality. I also introduced the Episcopalian Rev Dr Kathryn Reinhard, whose work on recognition suggests that Christian identity is shaped through relationships of recognition, and that failures of recognition affect both the person who is not recognised and the person who cannot recognise. 

Much of what I wrote about ecumenical encounter in that reflection was concerned with how we see the other. For example, Reid reminds us that much of what we know comes through trusting what others tell us. Murdoch teaches us something about attending properly to what is before us rather than seeing only what confirms what we already think. Both helped me argue that we need to allow Christians of another tradition to speak for themselves rather than deciding in advance what they believe and why. Reinhard raised a more uncomfortable possibility. Ecumenism may require not only that I learn to see the other, but that I allow the other to see me. The conversation with the pastor has made me suspect that I had not followed her thought far enough.

In her paper Recognition and Ecumenical Interdependence: Relationship beyond Division, Reinhard argues that a Church cannot fully understand itself in isolation from other Christians. How they see us matters too. If another Christian community struggles to recognise Christ in something we believe or do, we cannot simply assume that the problem lies with them. Their difficulty may tell us something about ourselves that is not easy for us to see from within.

I think there is much in this idea, although there is a limit to how far I can follow Reinhard. As I understand her argument, another Christian’s failure to recognise Christ in something my tradition believes or how it acts, bears upon whether we really are what we claim to be. That is where I hesitate because, surely, what is true does not become false simply because someone else cannot see it.

That said, their failure to see it still matters. It does not prove that we are wrong, but neither can we simply assume that they have misunderstood us. Instead, it should make us ask a simple question: why can they not see what we think is there? We may eventually conclude that they are mistaken, but only after allowing for the possibility that they have seen something about us that we have missed.

Once I allowed for that possibility, the conversation with the pastor looked rather different. He was not denying that God can be encountered in a consecrated church, and I could not answer his concern simply by explaining the theology of sacred space. He might understand that perfectly well and still be pointing towards something true. A building intended to embody Christian presence in a place still consumes enormous amounts of Christian money, time and energy simply to keep itself standing.

That left me with one uncomfortable thought: our buildings, as we actually use and maintain them, may not always be doing what our theology says they are for. A parish church may be a sign of Christian presence in a community and a place of welcome, but that claim has to be visible in the life around it. A building intended to serve the worship and mission of God’s people can, if we are not careful, become something they spend much of their energy serving instead.

The pastor had not proved that this was the case. He had, nonetheless, made it something I could no longer simply assume was not.

There was another reason his viewpoint bothered me. Looking back through my own writing, I found a reflection from November last year in which I had written about St Paul's image of the Christian community as God's temple. The temple, I wrote, is not made of marble or gold but of living, breathing people. We ourselves are the sacred space in which God dwells.

Of course, I still believe that. At the same time, I continue to value the Catholic understanding of consecrated place. For me, there is no need to choose between the two. What made me uncomfortable was something rather different. In the November article, I had been quite ready to write about Christians, rather than buildings, as the true temple, but much less ready to consider what that might mean when maintaining those buildings consumes resources that could otherwise serve Christian people and mission. The pastor had made me look again.

However, Reinhard’s argument does not only require me to consider what he might see in my tradition. It also makes me think more carefully about what I struggled to see in his. Part of the difficulty is that I see things in a parish church that his argument seemed to leave out. A parish church is open to the person who walks through the door and sits quietly at the back without telling anyone why they have come. It provides continuity in a place across generations. It is part of our heritage and tradition. Here in Norfolk, there are more than six hundred and fifty medieval churches, representing the highest concentration of medieval sacred buildings anywhere in the world. It is an increasing challenge to keep them all going but, through their existence and presence, they bear witness in their communities long after those who built them have gone.

Those things matter to me, and I believe there is real theological significance in them. But that does not mean that my way of seeing church buildings is the only way of seeing them. Nor does it mean that the pastor’s different perspective threatens what I value in them. The point of the encounter is that each of us may be able to see something the other finds harder to see. That is precisely why we need one another.

The buildings, of course, are simply where this question happened to arise. Every Christian tradition has beliefs and practices that seem obvious from within and look rather different from outside. We usually have good reasons for them. Nonetheless, another Christian may sometimes stand where they can see something that we cannot. That does not make them right and us wrong, nor does it require us to surrender conviction or judgement. It asks something simpler and yet harder: that we resist the temptation to explain them away before allowing what they see to question us.

This brings me back to the grammar of ecumenical encounter. I have spent much of my reflections asking how we learn to receive another Christian’s word about themselves: to listen before judging, to attend before categorising, and to allow another tradition genuinely to be other. Reinhard has helped me see that the same discipline must work in the other direction. Ecumenism requires not only that we learn to see the other more truthfully, but that we are willing to be seen by them. By that, I mean taking seriously how our tradition looks from where another Christian stands, rather than immediately explaining why they have got us wrong.

That may be one of the gifts available to us even while our divisions remain. Division itself is not the gift but because we stand in different places, we sometimes see things about one another that are difficult to see from within. I may see something in another tradition that its members struggle to see themselves; they may see something in mine that has become almost invisible to me through habit and familiarity. If we can receive that from one another, difference need not only separate us; it may also help us see more truthfully.

The pastor could not see why we keep the buildings. I thought I knew why, and within ninety seconds - if not quicker - I had explained it to myself. What I had not considered was whether, from where he stood, he could see something about us that I could not.

Perhaps that is the more challenging side of ecumenical encounter. We learn not only to look across our divisions and see the other more clearly; we must also be willing to let the other look back.

References

• Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Reid, T. (1983) Inquiry and Essays. Edited by R.E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. (Original works published 1764 and 1788).
• Reinhard, K.L. (2022) 'Recognition and Ecumenical Interdependence: Relationship beyond Division', Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 57(3), pp. 348-362.

Concept and article by Dr Ian Watson, whose lay views are his alone. He serves as County Ecumenical Officer with responsibilities to promote, support, and provide guidance on Christian Unity throughout Norfolk and Waveney. The purpose of Ian's regular reflections is to build on the standard arguments for Church unity in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising.

Image of Dr Ian Watson engaging in conversation with a fictional pastor created by him through photo art.  

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