“A haircut is defined by its edges. That’s what I was taught, that’s what I believe, that’s what I teach.” So declared my barber the other day, going on to talk about how if the edges are ragged or uneven, that’s what catches people’s eyes; and since he’s outstanding at what he does, and since what he said sounds perfectly reasonable to me, I believe him. He got me thinking, though: of what else could we say that? And specifically, is the church defined by its edges?
Of course, there are a lot of churches which quite deliberately define themselves by their edges, taking the “bounded set” approach to membership and identity: everyone who believes these twelve things is welcome, and anyone who doesn’t, isn’t. Keep the edges nice and neat, a sharp line between us and them, that’s the idea. It’s almost a way of defining the church by appearance. But what about churches which don’t take that approach? Are they, too, in some way defined by their edges?
I incline to think so, for a couple different reasons. Most obviously, there are those which quite deliberately and self-consciously invert that paradigm; they would tell you they don’t define themselves by their edges, but in fact, they do. It’s simply that, rather than taking pride in their nice neat edge, they take pride in having a ragged one—it’s their chosen mark of “authenticity.” “We’re open to x kind of people—we’re Christ-followers, we accept everybody just like Jesus did,” and so on. Certainly, sharing the desire of Jesus and Paul that the gospel should be preached to all people, regardless of any other considerations, is a good and noble thing; but focusing on the ragged edge for its own sake is unhealthy. For one thing, it can make us disinclined to challenge people to repent and pursue God’s holiness; some people won’t find that “accepting,” and they’ll leave. (Others, meanwhile, will answer the call, and grow in holiness, and as a consequence will no longer look different enough to remind everyone how accepting we are.) We need to remember that our purpose is to preach the gospel and make disciples of Jesus Christ, and that we can’t subordinate those tasks to any other goal, however noble.
For another, a focus on the ragged edge can all too easily become a fetish, and an opening for spiritual pride and self-delusion—the delusion, if nothing else, that we actually are accepting of all people, when actually we’re simply accepting one particular group of people who aren’t accepted elsewhere. That’s a noble thing in its own right, but it’s not the same as building a church where all people are truly welcome; for one thing, it’s much easier. Building a church to fit one “out” group really isn’t all that hard, as these things go; building a church in which the goal is that anyone who comes will be welcome is extraordinarily difficult (in fact, it’s impossible by human effort), because it means accepting people who don’t accept each other, and teaching them to get past that and accept each other as well.
Even leaving aside intentional self-definition, however, I do think that in part, the church will always be defined by its edges whether it wants to be or not. Most basically, the edges are where the church interacts with the world around it; thus, whether a church sees itself as a bounded set (defined by its boundaries, and thus by whom it chooses to admit or shut out) or a centered set (defined by its collective focus, on which its existence is centered), whichever of those two models it uses to define itself, the world is always going to be looking at the edges, and drawing its conclusions from them. Do we maintain a nice neat edge by only welcoming people who are just like us, or do we make room for people who stick out? (And if we do, do we allow them to continue to stick out, or do we set to work changing them?) Granted the difficulty of truly accepting people who “don’t fit,” do we try? Are we willing to pay the price to minister to people who are “extra grace required”?
It seems to me that if the church is being the church, we should expect some ragged edges. (This is the truth that gets exaggerated in churches that take pride in them.) After all, the only way to prevent that is to focus on the edges ourselves, and that’s not what we’re called to do; the church should be not appearance-driven but (to quote Jared Wilson) gospel-driven. As Jesus defines us, we are a people on the way, his disciples traveling together down the road through life, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God” (to quote my denomination’s mission statement). This is why my own mental image of the church is rather like a comet: there are those who are farther along and more mature in their faith, leading the way for the church, and then others who haven’t come as far yet, and then the trailing edge is rather ragged indeed; but the key is that we’re all traveling the same direction, and that those who join us aren’t left to trail along behind, but instead are nurtured and discipled and mentored until they too are mature and strong in their faith and ready to do the same for others.
In a way, then, pastoring is a matter of barbering churches, but with a bit of a different emphasis than most people would probably expect. Being a pastor isn’t a matter of keeping the ragged edges trimmed; rather, we have to be careful to allow them, lest we end up trying to shut people out of the kingdom of God—and we need to make sure that the church as a whole understands this as well. At the same time, though, we need to make sure people aren’t left hanging around on the ragged edge, as if that was good enough; we need to bring them toward the center, toward the focus: toward Jesus. The movement of the church, and of everyone in it, must always be toward Jesus.