The Church

...In one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church...

We must first focus on the word "Church." In the Greek original of the Symbol of faith, we find the word ekklesia which may be translated as: "the assembly of those who are called," or in other words, the people called to this assembly, the people agreeing to this call. To put it another way, it is not simply an assembly, which might be accidental and have no particular meaning or task whatsoever. No, it is first an assembly with a particular purpose, and secondly, it is the assembly of people who are called to and capable of fulfilling that purpose, of realizing it. Thus, in order to understand the central place of the Church in Christian faith, we must ask ourselves: who gathers this assembly, and for what purpose? To the first question Christ Himself gives the answer in the Gospel: "I will build my Church..." (Mt 16:18). Christ builds the Church. It is the assembly, the union of those whom Christ has called and continues to call. Christ founds the Church even before approaching the people with His preaching. Indeed, Christ begins His task pre­cisely by calling to Himself twelve men to whom He says: "You did not choose me, but I chose you..." (Jn 15:16). And after His departure it is these very twelve who re­main as the Church, and they in turn "call" people to join them.

Thus, the Church is founded on Christ. It is His Church, the response to His call, the obedience to His will. It is important to keep this in mind, because Chris­tians themselves often forget and begin to view the Church as "theirs," as an organization essentially called to serve them, to satisfy their spiritual and non-spiritual needs and demands. Yet the very word Church shows above all that it is the union of those who are called to serve Christ, and to continue His work. It is service not to self but to God. What is this service? Or rather, what is the purpose, the task for which Christ founded, or as He says, "built" His Church? The answer to this question is given by the Symbol of faith in the four adjectives pre­ceding the word "Church": "I believe," we each say, "in One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church." We will briefly consider each of these attributes.

The Church is One. We must emphasize immediately that this word is a description from within the Church and not from outside. It is not an external, but an inner and spiritual characteristic of the Church, since externally the Church is dispersed into many "churches," or as one of the early Christian documents puts it, it is "scattered" throughout the world (Didache, 9:4). And yet, wherever it is, however scattered it is, the Church is everywhere called to manifest to people that unity which was revealed in the world by Christ. For the world and man live by the law of division and opposition; everything on earth di­vides people—everything—even that which "unites" some of them: nationality, belief, ideology, taste, and so forth. The world's sin and tragedy is that its entire life is fundamentally a war of all against all for the sake of self. Christ's antidote to this division is unity or oneness, and oneness above all with God, oneness from above; for the closer people are to God, the closer they are to each other and to unity amongst themselves. Christ came to all and for all, and therefore in Christ, in His teaching, in His life, people are able to find that oneness of faith, hope and love which nothing else in the world can give, and which is finally the ultimate goal, the ultimate calling of the world and man: the unity of everyone and of everything in God. It is this oneness which is in fact the Kingdom of God, and it is this new oneness of all and everything in Christ which the Church is called to manifest, to serve, to bring into being in all places and at all times.

"I believe," we say further, "in the Holy Church." The word "holy" does not mean, of course, that the Church consists of saints and perfect people. It means rather that the Church's task is to make our life holy, to purify it with the power of God, to liberate it from enslavement to sin, to offer it to God, to direct it upward, to transform it by the Holy Spirit.

After confessing the holiness of the Church, we con­fess the Church's catholicity. The word "catholic"—in Greek katholike—means firstly that which is worldwide, universal, and secondly, wholeness and fullness. The Church is universal because Christ and His teaching are addressed not to any one people, nor to one particular era or culture, but to all mankind, to all cultures and to all eras. We often forget this; we constrict the Church and Christianity to "our own kind," we refashion it into some­thing narrow, provincial, partial. But Christ says: "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation" (Mk 16:15)... and for centuries the Church has sung in response: "Let all the earth worship Thee..." (Ps 66:4). This is because the teaching of Christ is an organic whole, which means that it is all-encompassing, embrac­ing within itself the whole life of man, answering all his questions, directed to all of life.

Finally, we confess that the Church is apostolic. The apostles, as I said earlier, are those first twelve disciples whom Christ Himself chose and formed as the Church's foundation; in Greek the word "apostle" means "one who is sent." In saying that the Church is apostolic, we confess first that it was founded upon, and forever remains founded upon the witness, teaching, and preaching of those apostles chosen and instructed by Christ Himself. And secondly, we affirm that the Church is always sent into the world, to people, to the whole creation, that it always remains missionary, i.e., doing the work of Christ in the world. This is the meaning of those words about the Church in the Symbol of faith, a meaning that especially today is so crucial to remember.

From: Celebration of Faith by Fr. Alexander Schemann, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1991