Be the church!

The church is not a building.  The church is not a service.  The church is not an event.  The church is people.  It is a community of people united by their common connection to Christ.  Though we may not actually believe it, it is ingrained in our language that church means a building or a service.  We say, “I am going to church” or, “How was church today?”  There is nothing wrong with using the word “church” to refer to the building or service, but I’m afraid that the word has lost it’s real meaning somewhere along the way.  Church is a people united to Christ, and thus, to each other.

 We see this all over scripture.  Acts 12:5 says, “So Peter was kept in the prison, but prayer for him was being made fervently by the church to God”.  The point is that buildings or services don’t make fervent prayer; people do.  Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:18, “For, in the first place, when you come together as a church…”  What Paul does not say is, “When you come together IN the church,” or, “When you come together DURING church,” or, “When you come together AT church.”  He says, “When you come together AS a church,” because church refers to a group of people.

Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:2 are instructive.  He says, “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.”  Paul identifies the church as “those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling…who call on the name of...Jesus.”  In other words, the church is a community of people united by Jesus as Lord and Savior.”

Yet the church is much more than people with similar interests deciding that it would be fun to get together.  It is not analogous to a vintage car collector’s club or a business owner’s society.  The church is God’s plan and purpose; it is His idea, not ours.  Paul is very clear about this.  He says in Ephesians, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (5:25).  Christ did not die to create a bunch of individual Christians; He died to create the church.  Paul goes onto say that Christ “nourishes and cherishes” the church (5:29).  Christ cares for the church as a whole, as an entity.  Paul describes the church as Christ’s body, with Christ as the head (Col. 1:18).  The point is that we belong to Jesus as part of the church, not as individual, isolated believers.  

May we BE the church to the world!