Like a fire

Defining Church

I got the Emergent Village’s e-newsletter and thought about it for a long time. In it, Phyllis Tickle talks about the need for each generation to define what they mean by “church” and “Church.” She says:

“For quite some time now, analysts and pastors and observant Christian laity alike have known and said that church is not a place, nor is it a thing.”

This wouldn’t be a shock to almost any church-goer. We have all heard the song. Certainly church is not just a place or a building. It isn’t just a group of people either. But Phyllis goes on and says:

“Some have even suggested that church and/or Church is best defined as an event. I like this one. In fact, I liked it a lot for a while. It comforted me, if for no other reason than that it was less static. While still a noun and therefore a bit of a thing itself, it had buried in it the ghost of a predicate, the cachet of an action. But then, the more I embraced it, the more it seemed to be just that … a ghost, a cachet, a rhetorical fix.”

The church as an event. I can see that and I think it is probably as good as any other. Yet, it doesn’t provide me with a comprehensive definition either. Church isn’t just an event. In my view it is much more than a place, a thing, an event, or a group of people.

The Bible talks about the church as a body, alive and moving, doing Kingdom things, the Bride of Christ, gifted and equipped to do the works of God. Even that definition falls short of what happens when people become a church. There is a special bond that exists between people in the church that is much like family but even more extraordinary. When the church works as it should, it is a place of comfort, healing and yet challenging in the same way. It is a hospital, military base, home, library, university, coffee house, personal home, street corner and many others.

Defining the church is just as hard for me to define comprehensively as it is to describe a Holy God. Also, there is a problem with this definition. Since it encompasses all these things, does that mean something is NOT a church if it isn’t all of them? I don’t think there would be a church in America or maybe even the world if they all had to be all of these things all the time or even occasionally.

So th pursuit of a wholistic definition is a fun exercise, but also fairly useless. The church is just a couple or bunch of people loving God together. Anything else to me is icing.

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One Comment

1. 

   Good stuff. I have been thinking a lot about this and about other definitions of church...Here is a brief intro into what is bouncing around in my head: Early Church defined the church as - One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Calvin said something like - right teaching (gospel), properly administered sacraments, discipline...maybe 2 other things I can't remember I am thinking - One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic - addendums...nicene creed adherence, sacraments...not sure about discipline.

   Chris Zoephel / 04 Jan 2009 / 3:53 PM