When I was young, I read several books by Ludvig Hope. Mot maalet (Towards the Goal), Eit ord i dag (A Word for Today), and Kyrkja og Guds folk (The Church and the People of God) are the ones I remember. There were surely others. I cannot now account for everything I read or identify precisely which ideas lodged themselves where. But these books were part of the Christian literature that formed me, and it is hard to believe that they left no mark.

One of the questions Hope cared deeply about has stayed with me longer than I realised at the time: What is the Church, and where do we find Christian fellowship?

For me, the answer has never fitted neatly into a simple opposition between the church and the prayer house. I needed something from both. Only later did I find a parish where much of what I was looking for came together.

A Preacher Who Challenged the Boundaries of the Church

Ludvig Hope lived from 1871 to 1954 and was one of the most influential figures in Norway’s low-church lay movement. He was a preacher, author, and leader within the China Mission Association, the organisation that later became the Norwegian Lutheran Mission, and his writing shaped generations of Christians associated with prayer houses and missionary organisations.

Hope was not content simply to ask whether people belonged to the established Church. He wanted to know whether there was genuine spiritual life within it.

In Kyrkja og Guds folk, first published in 1923, he drew a distinction between the organised, institutional Church and the people of God. In later writings, he expressed his understanding even more clearly: “The Church is the people of God.” The Church as an external structure could provide a framework for Christian life, but the framework was not identical to the living community of believers.

This was not merely a theoretical exercise. It concerned the freedom of laypeople to gather, preach, bear witness, and take responsibility for their own Christian fellowship.

Yet the relationship between these two forms of community was not straightforward. One particular remark by Hope captures the problem with striking clarity.

Communion in One Place and Fellowship in Another

In a scholarly study of Hope’s understanding of the Church, Endre Stene quotes a sentence that goes straight to the heart of the issue:

“In the church we have Communion, but no fellowship. In the Inner Mission we have fellowship, but no Communion.”

The quotation should not be taken as a description of every parish or every prayer house. It expresses a tension Hope recognised in the Christian landscape of his time.

The parish offered the sacraments, the liturgy, and a connection with the wider Church. The prayer house offered closer fellowship, lay involvement, and an environment where personal faith could be voiced and shared.

Hope did not think this separation was satisfactory. Among other things, he argued for what was called “free Communion”: celebrations of the Lord’s Supper led by laypeople outside the ordinary parish service and without the usual clerical supervision. In 1913, private celebrations of Communion within the Church of Norway were formally authorised.

My own story took a different direction. I did not come to believe that the answer was to move Communion out of the parish. But I recognise the question Hope was asking.

Why should the sacramental life of the Church and the living fellowship of believers seem to belong in separate places?

The Prayer House in Our Rural Community

The prayer house of my childhood was not a place where hostility towards the Church dominated the atmosphere.

My parents took me both to church and to meetings at the prayer house, and I grew up with the sense that these two settings belonged together. As I mentioned in an earlier post, our local parish pastor even dedicated the prayer house. His preaching could also be just as direct as that of many lay preachers.

The preaching could be both rewarding and challenging. There were speakers who helped me think more deeply about faith, and others who put words to questions I had not fully understood how to ask.

At the same time, the meetings usually took place in a fairly calm atmosphere. They were rarely marked by the kind of revival preaching where people were urged to raise their hands or come forward for prayer.

That is worth mentioning, because the word “prayer house” may call to mind very different images depending on a person’s experience. Some remember intense meetings and strong pressure to make a visible decision. Others remember an ordinary gathering place where the Christian faith was expressed without much dramatic display.

My memories are closer to the latter.

This does not mean that the preaching lacked seriousness. It means that seriousness and emotional intensity were not necessarily the same thing.

Bazaars, Gatherings, and Christmas Celebrations

The prayer house was not only a place for sermons.

There were fundraising bazaars, larger gatherings, Christmas-tree celebrations, and other occasions when people from the local community came together. In a rural area with relatively few places to meet, this mattered.

The prayer house was a natural gathering place. People met neighbours, shared practical tasks, and took part in something that extended beyond their own homes and families. Some prepared the room, some made coffee, some looked after the children, and others contributed in different ways.

Looking back, I think this social dimension was more important than it might sound when described merely as a list of activities. A Christian community is not made up only of doctrines or meetings. It also grows through the ordinary opportunities people have to see one another and do things together.

Laypeople were not simply an audience. They could share testimonies, help organise events, contribute practical work, and become involved in the life of the community.

Not every contribution was profound, and not every testimony was equally helpful. But there was something valuable about a setting where Christian life did not belong only to the person standing at the front.

No Organisation That Felt Like Mine

Several different Christian organisations visited the prayer house while I was growing up.

That gave me the opportunity to hear different preachers and become acquainted with more than one strand of the low-church movement. But it also meant that I never developed a particularly strong attachment to any single organisation.

I belonged more to the prayer house and the local community than to any particular association.

When I became an adult and moved closer to the town centre, there was therefore no obvious fellowship waiting for me. No particular group felt like the natural place where I belonged.

At first, I attended different meetings in different places. I was also somewhat reluctant to attach myself too strongly to any one community.

Part of that reluctance had to do with the atmosphere in certain groups. Some were more openly revivalist than the prayer house I remembered. There could be an expectation of emotional closeness, visible spiritual commitment, or a kind of intimacy that I found difficult.

I do not mean that everyone who felt at home in those communities was wrong. But what others experienced as warmth could, for me, feel like pressure.

So I kept a certain distance.

The result was that I had access to many meetings but did not always know where I belonged.

What the Church Gave and the Prayer House Lacked

I also went to church from time to time, and I did not experience the parish and the prayer house as mutually exclusive alternatives.

On the contrary, I thought they complemented one another.

At the prayer house, there was greater freedom for laypeople to contribute. It could be interesting to listen to personal testimonies, and taking part in practical tasks created a sense that the community belonged to the people who gathered there.

In church, I encountered something else: the liturgy, the sacraments, and a form of worship that did not depend entirely on the preacher’s personality or the atmosphere of a particular meeting.

I experienced the sacramental character of the service as something positive. It gave the gathering a dimension that was missing from the prayer house.

That did not make the prayer house less valuable. It simply meant that I could not imagine attending only a prayer-house fellowship and leaving the Church behind.

For me, preaching and fellowship were important. But they were not everything.

I also needed a community gathered around something that was given rather than something we had to create ourselves.

Hana Parish Brought Together What I Needed

Hana parish eventually became an important intermediate position in my life.

Here I encountered both the sacramental community of the Church and an active fellowship of laypeople within the same parish.

Communion was celebrated regularly, and the service had the liturgical character I valued. At the same time, laypeople were not reduced to passive spectators. There was room for participation, practical involvement, and contributions from people who were not ordained. At times, laypeople led gatherings or gave the address.

It was not as free in its form as the prayer house. The service followed the structure of the Church of Norway, and the roles were more clearly defined.

But for me, that was not a problem.

What mattered was that the different elements of Christian life were no longer scattered across separate communities. The sacramental fellowship and the living involvement of laypeople belonged to the same parish.

For the first time, I did not feel the same need to look elsewhere for what was missing.

Hope had identified a division between Communion and fellowship. At Hana, I experienced something closer to an answer.

When the Scaffolding Is More Than Scaffolding

Hope sometimes described the institutional Church as a kind of scaffolding around the real Christian community.

The image has a clear point. A structure exists for the sake of the life it supports. If the structure becomes more important than the people, or if membership and organisation are mistaken for living faith, something has gone wrong.

I can understand the force of that criticism.

A parish may have a beautiful church, proper services, and an established administration without necessarily being a place where people feel known or supported. A Christian institution can become so occupied with preserving its own arrangements that it forgets the community those arrangements are meant to serve.

But I also find that the scaffolding image becomes too limited if the visible Church is treated as merely an external framework.

The sacraments are not simply organisational arrangements. Nor is the shared liturgy merely a convenient structure around the “real” spiritual life happening somewhere else.

For me, these things belonged to the life itself.

The visible community, the prayers, the physical gathering, and the regular reception of Communion were not detachable packaging. They helped form the Christian life I needed to live.

That does not mean that every church structure is beyond criticism. It means that the visible and sacramental dimensions cannot simply be reduced to scaffolding.

The People of God in Catholic Teaching

When I later encountered Catholic teaching about the Church, I discovered that the expression “the people of God” was not foreign to it.

The Second Vatican Council devoted an entire chapter of Lumen gentium to the people of God. The Church is not understood simply as its clergy, institutions, or administrative structures. Through baptism, believers share in the life and mission of the whole Christian community.

The Council also speaks about the common priesthood of the faithful. Laypeople are called to prayer, witness, service, and responsibility, each in their own way.

The same document also describes the calling and responsibility of laypeople. Their task is not merely to attend Mass and leave everything else to the priest. They have their own place in the Church’s witness, service, and mission in the world.

That does not mean that Catholic teaching removes the distinction between ordained ministry and the vocation of laypeople. The Church understands these callings as distinct, even as both belong to the life of the same people of God.

Nor does it mean that Hope’s understanding of the Church and Catholic ecclesiology are identical. They are not.

Hope’s distinction between the institutional Church and the living people of God emerged from a Lutheran, low-church setting, and his conclusions about ecclesiastical authority and lay-led Communion cannot simply be transferred into Catholic theology.

But the question of whether the Church is genuinely a living community of believers is not a question that Catholics can dismiss.

It is also our question.

The Questions That Remain

The Catholic Church can speak beautifully about the people of God and still have parishes where laypeople feel anonymous or only marginally involved.

A well-celebrated Mass does not automatically guarantee that people know one another. A strong sacramental theology does not, by itself, create friendships, mutual care, or opportunities to participate.

This is where my memories of the prayer house still matter.

The lay movement understood something important about the need for ordinary Christians to take responsibility, contribute their gifts, and become more than an audience.

The prayer house also understood that fellowship cannot always be reduced to the formal gathering itself. Bazaars, celebrations, shared tasks, and informal conversations may seem less theologically significant than preaching or the sacraments, but they can help create the human connections through which a community becomes real.

At the same time, my experience in the Church reminds me that a warm fellowship is not enough if the sacramental centre disappears.

A community can become so preoccupied with activity, personal testimony, or emotional closeness that it places more weight on what its members generate than on what they receive.

Both traditions, then, have something to ask of the other.

The prayer house can ask whether the Church is truly a community in which laypeople have a voice and a place. The Church can ask whether the fellowship remains connected to the wider body, the sacraments, and a life that does not depend only on the strength of its members’ experiences.

Neither question should be ignored.

The Two Communities I Needed

I do not know how much of Hope’s understanding of the Church I absorbed when I read his books as a young man.

When I read him today, I do not find a ready-made explanation for everything in my own journey.

His situation was different from mine. His proposals were not always the ones I would choose. And the difference between a low-church understanding of Christian fellowship and a Catholic understanding of the Church cannot be made to disappear simply because both speak about the people of God.

But I recognise the concern that shaped his thinking.

Christian faith needs more than formal membership. It needs people who gather, share responsibility, and make room for one another.

At the same time, my own experience has taught me that fellowship also needs more than the closeness of a meeting or the enthusiasm of those who attend.

I needed the preaching and the ordinary, practical participation I encountered in the prayer house. I also needed the liturgy, the sacraments, and the wider community I encountered in the Church.

At Hana parish, those things came together in a way that mattered deeply to me. Later, they continued to shape what I looked for in the Catholic Church.

The question was never whether the prayer house or the Church had everything.

The question was where the gifts of both could become part of the same Christian life.

I did not need to choose between Communion and fellowship.

I needed a place where the two could belong together.

Sources and Background Reading