Making of Theology - What Is The Church?

The story of the Gospel began in the OT as God sought to act in redemptive ways towards humanity. God chose a peculiar people known as the Isrealites to be the vessels through which the world would experience reconciliation and redemption with God and one another. The OT prohpets indicate that Isreal did not live up to its calling to be the light to the nations. The climax of God’s redemptive project culminates in the person of Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus calls and invites anyone who desires to follow Him to then become participants and characters within God’s redemptive story. This new society and community that is birthed becomes known as the church…the called out ones.

However, in our Western American culture we have perhaps come to understand church very differently than what is understood in the first few centuries of the church. Most of us pehaps can only envision a church as a building or place we go to, or maybe it is a worship service, or specific programs that happen on church property or grounds. Programs such as; Sunday School, Awanas, discipleship groups, prayer meetings, men’s groups, women’s groups, seminars, VBS, summer camps, ect. It is not that these programs are inherently bad, but that we associate and define these things under the rubric of church because of the specific location where they occur, and/or the content that they discuss.

As such we have subsequently created a christian sub-culture that is for club memebers only. If you speak the right language, have your life together and in order, if you are alligned with the correct political group, if you live in the right neighborhood, and you beleive the right things then you are welcome to join this great group. However, if you don’t live up to these criteria then you are shunned or at least will always feel like your an outsider because you don’t measure up. In addition, we have strategically removed people from their sphere of influence, and have placed them in a church member’s only schedule of activities.

It seems that the early church could not be described in the above fashion. The early church seemed to be more of a movement than an institution, more fluid, organic, and dynamic than static, stale, and obstinate, a counter-cultural community rather than a community that maintained the status quo, an eschatalogical community (being a foretaste of God’s Kingdom) rather than a specific denominational flavor, it was a living body (Christ’s body and presence in the world) rather than the same ole dead religion, it was a society of Jesus followers committed to living out the ethics and mission of Jesus in the world rather than being politically driven or motivated by another agenda, it was messy, complicated, and diverse, not cookie cutter, quick fix, or streamlined.

The church is not something we do or go to it is something that we are! We don’t go to church we are the church. The church wasn’t designed to bring people in, but we were designed to be sent out. We don’t invite people to a worship service, we invite them to become partakers and participants of God’s ongoing redemptive story. How crazy to think that the church is merely about going to Sunday School , a worship service, and maybe a small group during the week.

Explore posts in the same categories: christianity, church, jesus, kingdom of God, theology