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For the last ten years, I’ve spent a lot of discretionary time thinking, speaking, and writing about following Jesus in everyday life—in families, at work, in the community, and so on. In this series, I’m exploring some words and concepts in the Christian subculture that might inadvertently make it harder for us to follow Jesus: I’d like to discourage the use of these discouraging words.

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How we use the word

If you ask a group of evangelicals, “What’s church?”, many of them will say, “It’s not the building; it’s the people.” But ask them what they like or dislike about their church, and chances are they’ll start telling you about the Sunday gathering: “There’s really great preaching,” or, “The music’s a bit old-fashioned.” So there’s often a gap between our confessional or abstract theology of church (“It’s about people”) and our functional or practical ethics of church (“It’s about events”). Our verbs betray us: “I go to St Agatha’s” is much more common than, say, “I belong to St Agatha’s.”

Why this is discouraging

This event-centric view of church is discouraging for several reasons. First, it neatly dovetails with the church-centric view of “ministry” that I outlined in a previous post: that is, the way I serve Jesus is in church activities; church activities happen at centralized events (especially Sundays and Bible studies); therefore the place I serve Jesus is at Sunday gatherings and Bible studies. This means some of us use church events as a kind of “spiritual barometer” you can tell how someone is going with Jesus by the number of church activities they’re involved in. It can also give churches a kind of tunnel vision in discipleship and mission. For example, if a major sporting event (State of Origin or a World Cup Final) falls on a Bible study evening, you may think it’s more godly to hold the Bible study, rather than have a meal with unbelieving friends and watch the match with them—even though we have about 90 occasions a year where it’s easy to study the Bible formally together, but only a handful of occasions where it’s easy to get our non-Christian and Christian friends to meet.[1]

More broadly, however, viewing church just as something we “go to” places an impossible load on church events and on those who run them. Because the vision of the New Testament is that God’s people love one another in a whole range of ways, and there’s no way these can all be achieved at formal weekly gatherings. We’re to “carry one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2) and “rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15); we’re to be hospitable and to share our possessions with one another (e.g. Romans 12:13; 1 John 3:11–18); when conflict arises, we’re to “maintain unity,” “bear with one another,” and “forgive one another” (e.g. Romans 15:1–3; Ephesians 4:1–6, 32); we speak the truth in love to one another (Ephesians 4:15–16), teaching and admonishing one another (Colossians 3:16); we pray for each other and confess our sins to each other (James 5:16), and so on. And this is before we work together to love our neighbours beyond the church.[2]

This “life on life” or “iron sharpening iron” view of discipleship implies an investment of time—and money, and emotional energy—that goes far beyond sitting in the same building or the same lounge room together for a couple of hours a week. Hebrews 3:13–14 envisages that we encourage one another daily—not just weekly.[3] To take up the image of family: a family may hold events (e.g. a Sunday dinner), but you’re not only a family when you’re at the dinner table—your relationships transcend that event. In the same way, church members aren’t just a church when attending an event; they should see themselves as belonging to a continuous network of loving relationships. And yet, as we wrap up our conversations over our church morning tea, we often say, “See you next week!” How strange if we left our family dinner table that way.

Finally, when we think of church primarily as something we go to, we’re likely to overlook how important a vibrant church life (that is, outside scheduled events) can be to the pursuit of holiness. For example, imagine we want to promote godly marriages in our church. In an event-centric church, chances are we’ll try to hit the nail of healthy marriages with the hammer of church events. We may be tempted to think that if we’ve run a marriage enrichment seminar or given a series of sermons, we’ve ticked the box of creating healthy marriages. But we won’t necessarily have created conditions where church members can talk openly about their marriages, model godliness to one another, and so on. In the same way:[4]

  • We shouldn’t be content with running a youth group; we want to create conditions where young people learn from adults of various ages what it means to follow Jesus into adulthood themselves;
  • It’s good to visit an aged-care facility; it’s better to properly welcome and integrate elderly and less-mobile people into the daily life of the Christian community;
  • Before we invite an unbelieving spouse to a Sunday gathering, we might hope that church members have already taken opportunities to love the whole family in a range of ways;
  • Let’s hold evangelistic events. But let’s also promote meaningful friendships between Christians and non-Christians, and let’s equip Christians to speak the gospel fluently into the details of their friends’ daily lives.

It makes it harder to build and belong to this sort of loving community if our language consistently implies that church is just an event to attend.

Some more encouraging alternatives

Of course there’s more to reforming the culture of our church than simply changing our language. But at the very least, the words we use can signal clearer theological and ethical thought. It might be too hard to reserve the word “church” by itself for the people, so it may be better to talk about church members belonging to a church community. And this community might hold church gatherings in its church buildings.

Using this less ambiguous language is another way for us to love one another as we seek to follow Jesus together.


[1] There’s a bigger question here about whether we should think about changing our gathering times to fit the wider culture. Sundays are becoming “just another day”: more people have to work, and there are other community activities that it might be good for Christians to be involved in (like Clean Up Australia Day, and charity fun runs, and Nippers). There might be room for some churches to reschedule traditional gathering times for the sake of blessing our neighbours.

[2] For discussion of how to promote a loving community of disciples on mission, see Adeney and Heath, Organizing Love in Church (Summer Hill: Groundwork, 2015).

[3] I’ve often seen Hebrews 10:24–25 used as a prooftext for why Christians should go to church on Sundays. But given the context of chapter 3, it seems that the writer has much more in view than this.

[4] These examples are taken from Adeney and Heath, op. cit.

Image: flickr

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