I listen to a lectionary podcast each week and one of the features is an included reading from “A Great Cloud of Witnesses”, a book published by the Episcopal Church commemorating important figures in the Christian tradition (including Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and others). This week’s reading was for Richard Hooker, an Anglican Priest who lived in the 16th century. In his “Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity”, Hooker tried to find a middle way between puritans and latent anglo-Catholics who both objected to the Elizabethan religious settlement.
Here’s the part I loved: Hooker wrote that the church is a society rather than an assembly. He wrote, “Men are assembled for performance of public actions; which actions being ended, the assembly dissolveth itself and is no longer in being, whereas the Church which was assembled doth no less continue afterwards than before.” In other words: Church isn’t something we do only on Sunday morning or Wednesday night; church is something we’re part of 24 hours a day; church is something that we should be doing all the time, and together.