Mistaken identity: the church is not the kingdom.

For years, people who are involved in churches and synagogues have been told by people who are not, "I'm not involved in any institutional religion." There is a more recent addition to this, a harvest from self-help and twelve-step programs, plus popular angel lore and dumbed-down Buddhist literature: "But I am very spiritual." There has been an arch and unhelpful response to this from people who are involved in churches: "Would you rather be involved in a disorganized religion?" This is unfair, because all of our churches have a lot to answer for. Looking at us Christians from the outside, it is hard to see what would draw people to do what Jesus invited his first followers to do: Come and see.

What they are likely to see in too many cases is bishops fighting with other bishops or with clergy and laypeople. While the people who say "I am a spiritual person" or "I believe in spirituality" are headed in a terminally cloudy, feelings-led direction, the sad example of the churches makes it clear why they head that way. The idea of spirituality itself is a problem: It gets mixed up with all the stuff that makes you feel good about yourself, with therapy, with a sense of things having changed in your life because of something wise you decided to do. (I plead guilty to having edited a book called Modern Spirituality: An Anthology.) It can seem part of a self-help program in a time when helping yourself is all-important.

We can argue that this is an individualistic, potentially self-deluding direction, and we might well be right. But let me suggest that the church has its own problem here, and it doesn't have to do with the failure of all those barbarians or insensitive, post-Enlightenment, individualistic folks to appreciate a more communal sense of the Christian community. It has to do with the fact that we have come to see the church as something that exists in addition to what has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. And this really is the devil's work.

Paul's letters to the Corinthians and the Galatians make it quite clear that the church has always had a problem, but Paul's emphasis - everywhere - is that for the Christian "to live is Christ," that we are baptized into Christ, that the extent to which we can call God our Father is because of Christ, and that anything that distracts us from this relationship is deluding. His letters make clear a wrong direction that happened before Constantine but probably got even worse afterwards, and that is the thought of the church as an institution that involves Christ, somehow includes Christ - among other things. The church made its peace with power, and to some extent that was inevitable. Paul makes room for this peace, but it is, or should be, provisional. Where corruption really sets in is where the church, fearing for its position, is uncritical of power, or wealth, or (perhaps even more corrupting, because it is so much more subtle) when it fears loss of the good opinion of others, for seeming to be foolish. The church goes drastically wrong when it sees itself as an institution, one of many needed for a civil society.

The concern for power and position applies across the board: The liberal and the conservative have their own versions. It is easier for some liberal Christians to criticize Pat Robertson than to criticize the editorial board of the New York Times, despite the moral and spiritual bankruptcy in both places. The right, for its part, is too eager to get Caesar on its side.

Church politics resembles academic politics in its dishonesty. I have worked around real politics, and it is more or less clear (at least among its participants, when journalists aren't around) about the fact that what it really cares about is power and money and how they are spread around. It isn't pretty, and it certainly isn't good, but it is more honest and refreshing than a form of politics which pretends to be about God's work, or academic freedom, and is still really about money and power.

But it isn't only money, power, or prestige. I heard once about an old monk who said that what he would miss most, when he died and went to heaven, was the Mass. There is a profound cluelessness there. The most subtle temptation for church-prone people, really a dangerous one, is to love the church in an aesthetic way - to be in love with ritual itself, to delight in the feelings we now have about being part of the church, to belong too easily - dangerous, because it lulls us into forgetting that during the liturgy we are taking the bread of the kingdom that is still to come.

When the church forgets that its only reality is the Lord whose return we await, when it loses this eschatological sense of itself, it loses its truest vocation. Our work is to realize that "here we have no lasting city." We are to live (as the letter to Diognetus put it) as if we are at home in any place, and aliens everywhere. We are not, above all, to make the church a part of our lives. Our life in the church is either seriously an effort to realize what Paul meant when he said "to live is Christ," a life that looks forward to his coming, or it is nothing.