Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

It’s a glorious thing to participate in a church week by week, readily aware that you are part of the Body of Christ, gathered and formed. It’s tangible: each person contributing in ways great and small to the life of the whole. Each person knows that they matter, that if they weren’t there, others would notice, and an element of the liturgy or fellowship would be missing.

Paul gives us the metaphor in his first letter to the Corinthians: The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” The foot can’t say, “because I am not a hand, I reckon I’m not really part of the body.” Even more, Paul insists that the members of the body that seem more feeble are necessary. The ones society would overlook are the ones God calls us to honor with particular care.

“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

This Body awareness, often most visible in a small church setting, is profoundly important in any church. In some communities, it can require more effort to make it known, however.

Recently, secular writers have been offering concepts and wording that complement Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In their writing, they underscore the deep human need to matter and describe the conditions under which we are safe enough to discover that we do. Their new language and explanation may help us become more intentional about living into our identity as the Body of Christ.

Journalist and author Jennifer Wallace, whose Mattering Movement grows out of a deep concern for the growing epidemic of loneliness and disconnection among youth, describes mattering as the experience of knowing you are “noticed”, “affirmed”, and “relied upon” — that you make a difference to the people around you. She maintains that people are not primarily suffering from too little achievement; they are suffering from too little significance. A Christian would say they do not know they are loved.

The contemporary framework of psychological safety is another natural companion to Paul’s vision of the Body of Christ. Researcher Timothy Clark describes psychological safety in four dimensions: “inclusion safety” — the confidence that one belongs and is welcome; “learner safety” — the freedom to ask questions and make mistakes without shame; “contributor safety” — the assurance that one’s ideas and voice will be received; and “challenger safety”— the trust that one can even question the direction of the group without being punished. People will hesitate to contribute if they do not first believe they belong and will be respected.

Paul would not recognize words like "inclusion safety" and "challenger safety". But this framework of psychological safety does help us to see our way into Paul’s metaphor. It also rings true with our Baptismal Covenant to “respect the dignity of every human being” and to “seek and serve Christ in all people.”

In church, when the Body gathers, participants should know and feel that they are included — not provisionally, not conditionally, but as a matter of theological reality. Truly. Paul does not say that God “might” arrange the body as God chooses; he says God “has” arranged it (1 Cor. 12:18). Inclusion is not earned in the Body of Christ. It is given.

From that foundation, the community can become a place where questions are holy and uncertainty is not a sign of weak faith; where every voice, not only the loudest or most credentialed, shapes the common life. Hopefully, too, the community and its leadership will be courageous enough to hear the prophetic word from unexpected places, even from those Paul might call the “weaker” members, the ones in whom Paul suggests God has placed particular honor. (The Quakers have understood this for centuries.)

The church does not always live up to this vision. For one thing, it takes time when we might want to charge ahead and get things done (I write as a veteran of impatience and charging.) It means opening up to the unknown rather than relying on the familiar voices. It means being willing to risk being wrong.

We create hierarchies of closed circuits, expediency, and cultures of silence that leave whole members of the body wondering if they matter at all. People stop attending for a variety of reasons, among them the belief that they would not be missed or that their offering does not matter.

Paul’s answer is both theological and practical: suffering and rejoicing are communal acts. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). This is what psychological safety makes possible. Not a community without conflict or difference, but one in which no one is left to suffer alone, and no one is too diminished to celebrate.

The calling of the church, then, is to be a place where mattering is not a social reward for the impressive, but a theological given for the baptized. Where every person who enters knows, in their bones: *I am a necessary part. I am seen. I am indispensable.* Not because they have earned it — but because God has made it so.