Tag Archives: marks of the church

Rethinking Church #3: The Church is God’s Act

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What are the essential features of the thing we call “church”? Of course, most of us already have an idea of what “church” means—from the Bible, history, and our own experience. However at this point in the series I am asking everyone to place all those images aside to join me in rethinking the concept from the foundation up. How shall we proceed? Where shall we look to find the essential features of the church?

To get us started, let me make an assertion that I may need to modify later: we will find the essence of the church in its origin as documented in the New Testament. Perhaps we can learn more about the full implications of those essential features as the church takes different forms in different cultures and historical eras, but I am working with the assumption that its essence existed from the beginning and has not changed.

The most basic essential feature of the church is its origin in God. In Ephesians 1, we read about the grand story of salvation in Christ, from the depths of eternity (1:4, 11) to the gathering into unity of all things in Christ (1:10). At first, Paul speaks of the objects of God’s great love as “we” and “us” (1:3-10), but soon he begins to include those whom he calls “you” (1:11-18). Toward the end of the chapter Paul combines the “we” and “you” into a new “us” (1:19) that he calls “God’s holy people” (1:18) and “the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (1:22-23).

The church is God’s idea, God’s choice, and God’s act. God created it to achieve his purpose according to his plan. The church—whatever else it is—is the divine act of gathering all the scattered pieces of creation into unity in Christ by the power of the Spirit (Eph 1:13). We need to think of the word “church,” then, not merely as a noun designating an entity but as a verb describing an action. God is churching the broken, mutually hostile, and fragmented world. It will make clearer sense if we ignore the English word “church,” with its accumulated connotations, for a moment and think of the Greek word ekklesia, which means a gathering of people, an assembly. A gathering must be gathered by someone for some purpose. In reference to the church, God is the subject of the verb “gathering” and the gathering (the church) is the object.

In rethinking church, then, we must rid ourselves of any view of the church that in theory or practice displaces God as the primary actor and replaces him with human actors. The “gathering,” the “uniting” of all things in Christ that we call the “church” is God’s decision, choice, plan, and work. God is churching (reconciling) the world in Christ (2 Cor 5:19). The church is not our plan or project. It’s not for us to determine its purpose or measure its success. And its purpose is way beyond our power to make happen.

If we forget this essential feature of the church and try to “make it happen” by our own power, we may indeed achieve great things measured by human standards. We may build huge, wealthy, and influential institutions. We may entice crowds of people to say the right words. But only God can gather the scattered pieces of creation into unity in Christ. Our task is to let ourselves be churched by God. It is to believe, speak, and act only in harmony with the crucified and risen Christ empowered by God’s Spirit. Do we believe God can do this? Do we have the courage to let God be the primary actor is this event we call “church”? Can we be satisfied with what God does and the way he does it?

Next Time: the church is Christomorphic in form and Cruciform in action.

Rethinking Church #2 Where to Begin?

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I like to get to the bottom of things. I am not satisfied until I see how a claim is properly derived from a foundation that cannot be further analyzed. I know I am not alone in this desire, but I’ve been told that I am more obsessed with it than many others. So, let’s methodically clarify the essence of the thing we call church.

When something provokes us to take an interest in a thing and seek greater understanding, our minds begin sorting things, making distinctions, and seeing relationships we had not noticed before. One such distinction turns on the difference between the essential features of a thing and its accidental features. Conceptually, there is a very clear distinction between the two even if it’s difficult to apply to a real thing with precision. If you add or remove an accidental feature of a car, flower, or human being, these things still exist. But if you destroy an essential feature of a thing, it no longer exists. Aristotle said that a human being is essentially a “rational animal.” A human being can be short or tall, male or female, and brown or white. But if you remove life or rationality from a thing, it ceases to be a human being. Likewise distinguishing between the essential and the accidental properties of the church is one way to begin rethinking church.

Adding or subtracting accidental features from a church does not cause it to cease being the church. However removing an essential feature would destroy its churchly existence completely. What is left is not the church at all. As an example, let’s pick something uncontroversial. Whether a church meets in a public building, a private dwelling, or in a cave, makes no difference to its existence as a church. However, a “church” without faith in Jesus Christ is not a church at all. It is something else.

We need to exercise great care and humility in applying the essence/accident distinction to the real world church. Reading church history and observing the contemporary church demonstrates the great diversity in how this distinction has been applied. Many controversies, some of them bitter, find their origin in this diversity of application:

1. For it is possible to mistake an accidental feature for an essential one, expanding greatly the number of “essential” features.

2. Or at the opposite extreme, essential features can be treated as optional.

3. Or in a third possibility, one may burden the church with so many and such extraneous accidental features that it makes it almost impossible to live out its essence.

4. Or again, perhaps one could be so insistent that the church refrain from adding any accidental features that it cannot adapt to circumstances and can carry out its mission effectively in the real world.

Numbers 1, 3, and 4 retain the essential features of the church despite their excesses, deficiencies, and misplaced priorities. Only number 2 ceases to be the church at all. Given the possibilities for mistakes and the absence of the perfect alternative, you can see why I want to approach the question of the essence of the church cautiously, methodically, and with humility.

Next Time: The first and most fundamental essential feature of the church is its divine origin.