What is church?
That question is such a simple, profound question that it seems almost laughable that many Christians live most of their lives without ever asking it. Doesn’t it seem bizarre that we’d live most of our Christian lives and “going to church” without ever really wondering or taking the time to find out what church really is? I want to spend this entry and the next talking about what the Bible says church is.
I found it pretty funny the other day when a friend of mine showed me a book titled “What is a healthy church?” The book, in its defense is really written from a pragmatic point of view. In other words, what kind of church works? But to my surprise and dismay, the book didn’t rely at all on scripture to define what church really is!
If you went to cemetary….oops, I mean seminary….like I did, you might have heard a definition like this: a body of believing Christians who gathers for the purpose of worship, preaching, and prayer and practices baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Is that it? Hmmm. I don’t find that in scripture. Here is what I do find. ekklesia. It’s the Greek word that we translate into church. It means an assembly of Christians gathered together, a company of Christians, those anywhere who are united in Christ, the whole body of Christ. Nowhere do you see anything about a building. Nowhere do you see anything that relates to somewhere you go or something you do–other than the gathering part. Ekklesia is used 114 times in scripture and every time it refers to people. A special group of people.
I think to begin BEING the church, we have to come to grips with the fact that the church is us. WE ARE CHURCH! If we go to Wal-mart, the church is at Wal-mart. If we got to Starbucks, church is happening at Starbucks. I like what Neil Cole says–we have to lower the standard fo what it means to “do church” and raise the bar of what it means to “be the church.” In reality, we don’t DO church. Church can’t be done…except for the fact that by living, we Christians are doing church!
What about numbers? Is there a magic number for a gathering to be considered church? Jesus said that “where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them,” in Matthew 18. If it’s good enough for the presence of Jesus, I think that’s good enough for me!
That brings us to the next issue–the gathering. Yes, being the church requires us to gather together. Hebrews 10:24 tells us that we shouldn’t give up the habit of meeting together! But what does that gathering look like? Well, you’ll have to wait till the next blog to discover that!