A theology of the church

This is a journaling in order to answer the question, “What constitutes church?” Aside from purposes, targets, and programs how would I explain to an alien what the church is and how God designed it to exist both in corporate gatherings and dispersed?

Most of what I post today are questions, and I hope to be disciplined enough to return and elaborate as I study and evaluate.

What sparks this essay is a lunch conversation that I had recently that included some evaluation of where our local congregation is headed, and although it wasn’t said directly I believe I can say that there was an uneasy dissatisfaction with how things are going and with where we are heading. Most of it seemed to hinge on the big gatherings on the weekends, but I have begun to wonder if we place too much stock in that and it has caused me to ask, “Why is the weekend worship service the focal point?” The success of a church is largely measured by the numbers of people who come on a weekend. The majority of the energy of a staff is primarily focused on the weekend. We define whether or not a church is right for us based upon the weekend service. A majority of our personal satisfaction is bound up in our experience on the weekend in corporate gatherings. Is our condemnation of how consumer driven weekend gatherings have become really a condemnation on how consumer driven we are?

Can we honor God in corporate worship by providing some sacred space, some Holy Ground, and still be relevant or at least communicate the truth with relevance? Have we erred on the side of removing barriers to the point that we also keep people from counting costs when it comes to following Jesus? In essence by ignoring or minimizing the sacred have we just made a person’s decision to follow Christ much like a risk free trial of a new Nabisco cracker?

We need to battle, on one hand, with the balance of being the church who relates a message of hope, love, compassion, justice, mercy, and righteousness to people in such a way that they understand, and on the other hand being the church that looks so completely different from the rest of the world that it sticks out like a sore thumb. I think we quit asking hard questions about why we do what we do because we’ve become entertainment. Instead we should be trying to find a way to cut through the entertainment expectation with life changing words.

Where is the tension between helping people feel at home, and yet also helping them feel like being with Christ is nothing like home on earth? Where is the tension between having reverence for the King of Kings and feeling the love of Abba, our heavenly Daddy? Where is the tension that, in my mind, has been sacrificed on the alter of experience?

Have we lost sight of the fact that we are not supposed to save the world, but just tell the world. I wonder what church might look like if we began to measure progress by how many people to whom we clearly presented the truth.

I wonder…