Author’s Note: this article was written more than a year and a half prior to my last post, “Playing Church,” but looks at the same issue through a slightly different lens. I actually hadn’t realized I was picking up on a theme I had already visited, but I thought it would be a good thing to re-publish the original anyway.
I regularly drive past a big billboard on Rt. 287 near Piscataway that is an advertisement for an area church. I don’t know a thing about this church, and it may be a wonderful, solid, God-honoring congregation … and maybe it’s not. But the billboard has a prominent slogan on it that says, “Come Rediscover Church!” Not “Discover Christ,” nor “Rediscover Christ,” but “Rediscover Church,” as if church was merely a way of life that some people get out of the habit of, and they need to get back into it.
When I was a teenager, I was a great fan of C. S. Lewis. I belonged to a mail-order Christian book club, and when they featured an author who was a “protege” of Lewis’, I felt I had to get it. It was Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy,” and the main point of the non-fiction work was how much and how strongly Vanauken loved and cherished his wife, how they both came to the Lord, and how God took her home. The title summed up how Vanauken made sense of her death: their relationship was approaching idolatry, and God took her from him so he would love God more. It was God’s mercy that he separated them, so that their relationship to each other would not become more important than their relationship to God. It was a heart-wrenching story, and I must have read that book a dozen times. It formed my ideas about what love really is, and to what extent God will work in our lives to bring us closer to Him. Vanauken’s later works were never featured in that book club, and there was no Internet to look them up, and decades passed before I thought to see what else he had been up to. To my sadness, I found that he too had passed away … but to my horror I also discovered that after his first book was published, after all the wonderful, godly lessons I though he had learned, he decided to join the Roman Catholic church. Even more to my horror, he stated his reason not as doctrinal, or spiritual in any manner. He simply enjoyed the Catholic liturgy; he thought it was beautiful, and therefore closest to the heart of God.
Seeing that billboard on Rt. 287 reminded me a lot of Vanauken. Again, I can’t state too strongly, that I do not know this particular church, or what they believe, but that billboard gives me the impression they are making Vanauken’s mistake: that the experience of going to church, and belonging to a particular church, is more important than the actual worship and service to God done there.
There are three primary ways that the modern American Christian uses the word “church.” The first, and the one most closely related to the way the word “church” is used in the Bible, refers to the members of the church, and the body they comprise. This includes all believers in Christ, without regard to denomination or local congregation (1 Cor. 12:12,13 ;Matt. 16:18; Acts 20:28). The second refers to the local congregation, or the local gathering of Christ’s Body. The word “church” is also used this way in Scripture (Acts 11:12, 13:1; Romans 16:5; for a few examples).
But the third way we use the word “church” is the one I’m going to focus on here, and that is the worship service that believers attend. The Bible does speak of believers getting together for various acts of worship (Acts 20:7; Col. 3:15; 1 Cor. 11:20; 1 Cor. 16:1,2), but the references are remarkably few and indirect. The closest reference at all to what we call “church” in the sense of getting together regularly is in Hebrews 10:25; it’s a powerful reference, but even there, what is done in such gatherings is not spelled out. We can infer from the other passages I’ve listed that various acts of worship and edification are to take place in such gatherings, but my point is that the Bible does not teach a specific liturgy, like what attracted Vanauken, and neither does it promote those gatherings as a lifestyle in and of themselves. Believers met for a purpose.
To understand that purpose, we have to get back to our first use of the word “church.” Take a closer look at Ephesians 1:22 & 23: “And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all,” and Ephesians 5:30: “For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.” People have a tendency to get all mystical about passages like those, but what exactly does your fleshy body do? It carries out the actions and the purpose that you want it to do. Barring some physiological or psychological dysfunction, your body is an instrument of your will. Even when you feel like you have no choice but to act in a certain way, you choose it because you don’t want to suffer the consequence of not acting that way.
Likewise, we the church are instruments of Christ’s will on this earth. Just like my eyes see the computer on which my hands type, so that my thoughts can be shared with my readers, members of Christ’s body see needs in this world, make those needs known to others who can fill them, and so His work gets done. Usually, the chain is far more complex than that; every ministry, which is to say, every action done on the behalf of Christ, requires the involvement of many believers. Even the simple act of sharing your faith with your neighbor means that someone taught you how to share what you believe, someone wrote the materials you used to support that sharing (which includes putting it in a language you and your neighbor both understand), and someone built you up and encouraged you to be able to do such a thing. Examine it carefully, and you will see many, many members of the body of Christ working together in any godly act. And that is what the church is really about. It’s not a weekly experience; it’s a daily act of submission to Christ, that we might be His hands, His feet, and His mouth to the world.
We can value the experience we call church, when we speak of the community, the rituals, and the ways we worship. It can be, and often is, an essential part of doing Christ’s will. But we must remember, it is a means to an end, and not the end itself.