13 Jul Why Your Church Isn’t a Church?
Recently I was at a combined churches event for Pentecost. It is always a terrific and happy occasion to gather with other believers. There is something wonderful and rich about being together with the Lord’s people.
On this occasion a Lutheran minister was assigned the task of preaching a short homily, and he recounted a conversation with one of his children. His daughter asked something like “How do we know we are the right church?” He did his best to answer the question and said some good things, but at the same time what was very obvious to me, was that at no point did he understand what the Bible says a church is. He assumed his Lutheran congregation was a church, and he assumed the Salvation Army, Baptist, Presbyterian and Anglican congregations were also churches.
None of them are churches, or at least not if the Bible is doing the defining.
When Paul wrote a letter to a church, it was always to all the believers in one location. So it would be to the church of Philippi for example. In the mind of Paul, the church was all the believers in a certain location.
Later in the Bible, in the book of Revelation we have the words of Jesus in his letters to seven churches, which are also seven places. In Revelation 2:1 within the letter to the Ephesian Church, Christ describes himself as one who walks among the lampstands. In other words, he walks among the churches, and the churches are cities or locations and the believers from that place.
Some people might counter this by suggesting that because denominational forms of Christianity didn’t exist yet, and there was only one church in each location, that this explains best the Bible language. But we counter that by suggesting that Christ described not only what did exist, but what was supposed to exist. Given that we are called to be one in Christ, it is entirely biblical that there is only one church in one location, which is what we see in scripture.
So technically there isn’t a Roman Catholic Church, or an Anglican Church of Australia, or a First African Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles… these are human ways of describing what is happening. Instead these are denominations or congregations that are labelled as churches.
As a pastor I have referred to the people under my care as my ‘congregation’ or perhaps it could be your ‘parish’ which is the area you minister to. But any church is certainly not yours – it is the Lord’s, and as his servants we minster alongside other ministers and ministry leaders in caring for the Lord’s people. Together we are the Church.
At the beginning of this blog I started by saying “Recently I was at a combined churches event…” Do you notice now what is wrong about that statement? I used the word churches there because that is the language everyone is used to, but in reality that isn’t biblical language to describe what happened. Rather it was a combined congregations event, or it was a full gathering of the church of Rockhampton.
We need more of these full church gatherings… they are so wonderful.