The Church Should Become an Ark

Lately, when talking to colleagues about the prospects for Unitarian Christianity, I’ve found myself countering their gloom by saying that the church can become an ark. More and more it seems to me that the Ark is the framing device that we need at this moment. Why so? And why have I changed the name of this blog to reflect this?

I was going to change it to Unitarian Christian Revival. But even though I believe that Christianity will revive in the UK, and that there can and will be a significant resurgence of Unitarian Christianity within this, it’s more accurate to talk about an Ark, because it indicates the steps we will go through to get to revival. 

The Ark, as in Noah’s Ark, is a symbol that indicates a definite attitude towards the past, present and future. 

In terms of the present, a church that aspires to arkhood sees that it is surrounded by so much that is headed for destruction. At the same time, it believes that it can identify that from the past which can provide the basis for a sustainable future. It gathers this within itself, preserving it in order to bring new life once the flood is over. 

To switch biblical metaphors, the church as ark believes that we are living in a society that is built on sand. Not only this, it sees that the dominant church within society is theologically sandbased. Unlike radical postmodern, or post-postmodern theologies, it rejects the idea that rocks, suitable for building on, don’t exist. There is truth, meaning and hope, but it was lost a long time ago. 

This means the church as ark is restorationist.  It needs to be restored to what Jesus and the early church believed, taught and did. The church took some appalling wrong turns within a few hundred years of the earthly life of Jesus. Although it wasn't able to destroy the gospel, and its transformative power, entirely, it distorted and undermined it. It exchanged rock for sand, and though the collapse was a long time coming, it's upon us in the West, now, for sure. Or to put it another way, the flood waters are rising, inside the church and out. But the Christianity that is failing is not authentic Christianity. It's time to get back what was lost.  

This was the original mission of Unitarianism, to rescue the future by recovering the past. I'd like others to join me in seeing this as the mission for our times too. 

We won't need to agree on everything. The ark metaphor applies widely.  People on opposite wings theologically, politically and culturally can and do make use of it, and so they should. We all sense that we are in the midst of a church, and a society that is heading for disaster.  But of course we differ enormously on the cause and nature of the disaster as well, as what it is that needs to go in the ark.

Are we not heading for some sort of collapse? It seems to me that we are, though we may get there slowly, like frogs being boiled. At some point this will become clear and there will be a hunt for new, better foundations. The church’s job is to have these on hand, though they will only be new in the sense that they are new to those who receive them. Jesus’s original message can be recovered, and through it the church can be restored. The church should become an ark in which Unitarian Christianity, as taught and practiced in the beginning, is nourished, in anticipation of a restoration once the flood is over. 

This isn’t a matter of returning to the faith of our parents or grandparents. The church got it massively wrong long before we were all born. The project is, as Joseph Priestley, and the whole tradition of Unitarianism before him understood, to restore the Christianity of Jesus, with a view to restoring the church, so that it can restore the world. It’s a long, long story, and we’re somewhere in the middle of it. That’s why it's too soon to talk about revival. But it's never too soon to talk about the future and the next steps on our way to it. That's why we need an ark.