I'm hung up on the idea of church. For years this was a problem for me, to the point that I could not bring myself to even attend a church. Having grown up going to church every Sunday and Wednesday, going to youth camps and revivals, church ski trips and special events, I was just tired of it. In fact, I still am.
In the United States, church is an institution. Collectively we tend to categorize churches the way we do schools and community centers - as institutions of significance in our communities. And when we view churches as institutions, we treat them as such. The problem with this paradigm is that we expect institutions to serve us, to provide some good. Schools provide education; banks provide money; libraries provide information and books; churches provide...well, lots of things. In fact as institutions churches are providing more and more. In my city of just under 200,000 residents there are at least a couple of dozen churches with gyms, and probably just as many with preschools and daycares. And every church, no matter how small, puts on a vacation bible school program in the summer. Churches are constantly looking for programs that will help them connect to the community, either through service, fun, study or what have you. Churches are bedrock institutions in America, to the point that you don't even need the Gospel to have a successful church.
But there is a problem here, because the Church - that body of believers with Jesus Christ as the head - is not an institution. The Bible variously describes the church as a living body and a building made of living stones. Paul goes into some detail about how the Church is a dynamic organism comprised of a diverse collection of believers, and how we as members of this body each serve an important purpose in making the body effective and whole. The scriptures don't spend much time detailing how to increase attendance. And nowhere have I yet found where it is written that the music comes before the preaching. In fact the Bible doesn't really communicate the model of church that we are using at all, but something altogether different, so I have no idea where we got what we have. How did the church go from sharing everything in common in the first century AD, to a bunch of strangers gathering once a week for an hour and a half to get a five point lesson on dealing with stress?
The American church is too much a product of American culture, which is why it has become an institution. The culture does not understand the Church as it's meant to be, because the culture has not tolerance for spiritual faith. But the culture has great tolerance for good works; in fact, it's the only aspect of the Church that the culture at large will tolerate. And so, in order to fit in, to attract larger crowds, to avoid stepping on toes, American churches embrace the model of The Serving Institution. We embrace the model of the Community Center and build gyms, host VBS in the summer, develop sports programs. We embrace the model of the library and become quiet places for people to read, information centers, halls of study. We embrace the model of the Public Space and offer our buildings as meeting halls, wedding chapels, gathering places. In these ways the church in America has become a bedrock institution that is primarily associated with community service rather than the Good News of Jesus Christ.
The tricky thing about my indictment of the American church is that, well, these community services are really not a bad thing. Who's going to complain about a preschool run by Christians? And wouldn't it be better to work out at the church than at a secular gym? What's wrong with vacation bible school if it brings in a lot of lost children to the church to hear about Jesus? All of these are valid defenses of the church in America, and I would be remiss if I said that churches do not provide good things. I haven't said that, by the way. However, the principle problem with churches in America is that, for the most part, these are the only substantive things being provided. When the best the church has to offer is a safe place for community activities, we have ceased being the Body of Christ and have instead become another community institution.
So if being a community institution is not sufficient for the Church, what exactly is the Church supposed to be? A few things come to mind. First of all the Church is the functioning Body of Christ in Jesus's physical absence. We bear witness to His good works and His good news - His Gospel - to others on the Earth. This is not as simple as taking a group around the neighborhood to knock on doors and "witness." You can't bear witness of something you haven't seen or experienced, so what is really important is building a relationship with the Lord, one in which you see, hear, feel and know Him. The Word says "Taste and see that the Lord is good." If you don't do that first, it's very little use telling others how good He is; you'll be describing something you've never tasted. So knowing who God is and what He stands for and who you are in Him is paramount. A second thing is this - loving people. There's a whole lot that we can do and accomplish both in our own names and in the name of Jesus, but as Paul reminds us, if we don't have love then these things are useless. But just what does it mean to love? What does it look like? Well, that's a part of the experience of being a part of the Body, learning what love is, how it looks, how it can be expressed and experienced, and how it ultimately glorifies God. A third thing I think the Church should be about is discipleship. Not Bible Study, but Discipleship, which includes a whole lot of time together becoming friends, building relationships and learning how to walk out the teachings of the Holy Spirit. Disciples spend more than an hour or two together a week. Disciples build relationships that are strong enough and safe enough for wounding to occur, and healing thereafter. Discipleship is hard, but it is not easily reproducible from time to time; you can't put Discipleship in a box and hand it off to someone else to duplicate. It takes time and dedication and love and relationship.
And so we see a theme here about Church, and I believe that it is this: the Church requires, above all, Love. Not love in the sense that we are used to at church - friendliness, empathy, enablement, soft words - but Love in the sense that Jesus conveyed. Jesus was not always nice and friendly; sometimes with his best friends he was downright rude. But he was always right; he was always true. And he had some damn close friends, men who willingly laid down their lives for him. He still has a lot of friends like that, and it's because of his Love, the Love he learned from the Father. We have to learn to love like Jesus and learn also that loving like him is at the heart of being the Church.
The beautiful truth I am learning about the Church, in light of the fact that Love is the principal piece of what makes the Church what it should be, is that church can happen anywhere. That is does happen anywhere and everywhere. I have church every Tuesday morning for an hour and a half with a friend of mine over coffee. And I have church pretty regularly in the evenings in conversation with my wife. I have church over beers with my brother when he is in town, and my family has church over hot dogs and margaritas with our friends and their kids. I have church when I meet a brother in Christ I have never met before and we are instantly family, and it doesn't matter what the setting is because the Church is a living body, a living temple, a dynamic thing that is never, ever contained in a specific setting or in a building of a specific architecture. I guess it's a good thing that I'm hung up on church then, because I'm constantly reminded that as a Believer I am a temple, a repository of the Spirit of the Most High, and I take Church with me everywhere I go.
So do you.
