A Vision of Church – Communion and Mission
For most Catholics, the celebration of the Mass is the fullest experience of what it
means to be Christian and what it means to be the Church. By gathering in the
presence of God and one another, listening to the stories of salvation, and
sharing the Eucharistic bread and cup at the table of the Lord, we reaffirm our
identity as Christians. Having thus celebrated the eucharistic Liturgy, we are
then sent back into the world in order to live the Christian life and to proclaim the
Christian message in our daily lives.
There is a rhythm at work in the eucharistic Liturgy and thus in the Christian life
as a whole that provides us with a key insight for understanding the Church. In
this dynamic movement of coming together and going forth, symbolized in the
rites of gathering and dismissal that frame the Mass, we have the basic elements
for a theology of the Church. In theological categories, those basic elements
may be termed “communion” and “mission”.
In the words of Pope John Paul II:
“Communion and mission are profoundly connected with each other,
they interpenetrate and mutually imply each other to the point that
communion represents both the source and the fruit of mission:
communion gives rise to mission and mission is accomplished in
communion.”
Thus the communion, the bond of relationship with God and one another, that
Christians experience in their daily lives and most intensely in the eucharistic
Liturgy, does not “close in upon itself.” Our life “inside” the Church is not a life
insulated from non-Christians and the secular world of the outside; rather, it is
precisely the experience to which we invite the entire world to participate…
communion and mission together form the nature or essence of the Church.
Father, Son, and Spirit – A Life of Perfect Communion
What we can know about the life of God is, of course, quite limited and imperfect.
Still, as Christians we believe that God has made it possible for us not only to
know something about the divine life but to participate in that very life.
The Church confesses its faith in the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. This confession, nourished in worship, has from the beginning of the
Church’s life been the very framework of baptismal, eucharistic, and credal
prayers. By the end of the fourth century, the Church came to a consensus
regarding the formula of its faith confession about God: one God who is three
persons. In our attempts to gain some understanding of this great mystery, the
Christian tradition has pondered what it means for God to be three persons.
Such reflection is in turn crucial for us to understand what it means to be human
persons, if we take seriously the teaching of Genesis that God created men and
women in the divine image (see Genesis 1:27).
The most important insight about the meaning of personhood is that we only truly
become persons in and through our relationships with others. We come to our
identity as persons when we make a gift of ourselves to others and, reciprocally,
receive in ourselves the gifts of others. We discover what it is to be a human
person through this rhythm of giving and receiving precisely because this very
rhythm is first of all characteristic of God’s life. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
are who they are because they share a life of complete giving and receiving.
All of this may sound quite abstract, but the basic point is utterly crucial: We
become human persons, and not just isolated individuals, insofar as we enter
into the pattern of self-giving and receiving that is first God’s life. And it is this
self-giving and receiving that creates communion, a communion of persons. Of
course, we must continuously discern how we are called to make these general
principles concrete and actual in our own lives. How are we to give ourselves
away to others? And how do we come to be who we are through the gifts of
others?
And what, again, is the heart of the experience of ecclesial communion? It is the
mutual exchange of our material and spiritual goods and talents, and of our very
selves for the building up of the Church in a given time and place. It is the
experience of interpersonal presence, dialogue, and conversation through which
we manifest ourselves to one another and grow in the sharing of our lives as
Christians. In sum, communion occurs to the extent that we make a gift of
ourselves to others and correspondingly receive from others the gifts that thy
offer.
The Church as Communion Mission,
-- Dr. Morris Pelzel
St. Meinrad School of Theology