What is Church Anyways? - Part 1
Ξ March 12th, 2006 | → 4 Comments | ∇ Theology |
I have been doing a lot of thinking about church and what the bible says that it is really all about. I’ve been asking the tough questions about whether what we are doing on Sundays is even meeting any of what is Biblically suggested that gathering as believers is all about. I am going to do a series of posts about this whole idea. I plan on looking at the place of worship, prayer, fellowship, teaching, spiritual gifts, outreach and music in our Christian gatherings. I’d do one or two per post. This post will give you an overview of what I’m getting at.
Ok. So what is church? (I don’t mean THE CHURCH, I mean church. The thing we typically do on Sunday mornings or evening or whatever. For Anglican’s it’s often that thing that happens when we go to Saint Whatever and watch a man in a dress talk to everyone.) Well in a nutshell it is supposed to be a meeting of Christians for the purpose of…what… That’s the question and the point of this whole thing.
What’s ok to have in our meetings?
Prayer: Yes
Worship: Yes
Fellowship: Yes
Teaching: Yes
Spiritual Gifts (the manifestations of…): Yes
Music: Yes
Outreach: Yes
So then it’s all settled? Well, no. I want to look more closely at these things.
The basic point of this series for me is that I feel that most churches (not all, but certainly most that I’ve been to) have big chunks missing from them. One of the main texts I’ve been looking at in regards to all this is 1 Corinthians - specifically chapter 14 verses 26-39 . This text describes a gathering of believers and how worship meetings or services should go. Perhaps some would say that it is just a suggestion that Paul is making while taking all his personal knowledge of Corinth into perspective. I believe it to be more of a road map for how to hold fruitful and purposeful gatherings of believers. I think there are some essential parts of this description that serve the specific needs of the Christian believer. To leave these parts out of our gatherings is to basically deny ourselves certain aspects of spiritual and community wellbeing.
So if I take an average of all the services I’ve been to and compare them to the description, I can get an idea of how close we’ve been coming to getting it right…
Verse 26 everone has a…
-hymn (or song): DING - we all seem to do that
-word of instruction (sermon or homily): DING - we all seem to do this too
-revelation: sometimes but sadly I think some pastors fail to make real connections between what we see in the Bible and what’s going on real life these days.
-a tongue or an interpretation: BZZZZZZ! Almost never.
verse 29
-2 or 3 prophets should speak - BZZZZZZZ! Most places I go to have ONE person running the show with a few people to do a few often scripted parts of the service. People are often not encouraged to excersize their prophetic gifts in public church. I think there is a trust issue between believers that needs to be addressed here.
Verse 30
-the stopping of the first speaker when someone sitting has a revelation: BZZZZZ! Usually people are not encouraged or even welcome to stand and give their take on any part of the sermon or whatever else is going on.
I think the things that got the BZZZZ are important pieces that God intended for us to embrace rather than control to the point of becoming a people who simple do not function in these disciplines. And yes, they are disciplines that require training, understanding, and even practice.
The questions are… If 1 Corinthians tells us what church gatherings are, and we aren’t doing that, then what is it we are doing? If what we are doing is not what church should be, then what is it? Is it helping? Does it have a purpose at all? If yes, then what purposes is it missing? Could it be a diluted version of what Jesus intended Christian gatherings to be? Is there some correllation between what we’re doing on Sunday (or what we aren’t doing) and the slow growth the church as a whole has been seeing in North America? Are people not eating our pizza because it’s pizza that is missing key ingredients? Do we have any sauce and cheese or are all our toppings just tumbling off before we even get it to our spiritual mouths?
I’m going to explore these questions and more in this series. As a preview, I think where my thought process is leading me, is to the belief that the heart of the purpose of our gatherings should be playing itself out in smaller groups than what we typically have in church on Sunday. Where the small gatherings are about meeting the meaty needs of Christians and to provide intimate encounters between us and God, the Sunday morning service is to provide an opportunity to respond to God corporately. Teaching, worship and fellowship are the main pieces of Sunday morning. What we get from God and outreach are better realized through the small group gatherings.
In this series, I intend to explain why I think all the above.