What is the Church - Lesson 1

Well, we're moving into a new topic now. It's a topic of the church. Talk about something with a little bit of controversy. Here we go.

Kind of the first question is what is a church? And I usually begin with points of agreement. I don't know if there are any points of agreement here. I mean, you look in English, what does the word church mean in English? It means a building. "Hey, you going to church today?" What does it mean in that sentence? "Hey, you're going to church today?" See, that's not a building. What does the word mean when you say, "Hey, you going to church today?"

[inaudible].

That's a meeting that you go to. And for many people, church is a building, which of course biblically, that's not going to be the case, because the church didn't have buildings for quite a while. Are you going to church today? Is a meeting that we go participate in. "Ah, look at all this stuff going on. The church ought to do something." Well, that's not a meeting or a building. What is it? "Church ought to do something." Well, that's the church as the moral police, kind of thing.

If you come from a more Catholic background, Roman Catholic or Anglo Catholic, the church is a eucharistic society, and that's a spot where the sacraments are done, and sacramental grace is offered to the people in the church. And one of the things that goes on right now in the Catholic church is that, as I'm recording this, an archbishop has denied a prominent political figure, a right to take Eucharist in the archbishop's area. And the prominent ... I'm being vague about names here, obviously. The prominent governmental authority that is the district represented. And so when the archbishop says "You cannot take the Eucharist in this district," it's short of excommunication, but it's almost there.

And that's the thing. In the Roman Catholic view, if you can't come and take the Eucharist, then you have no access to grace, which would end up leading you to go to hell because inevitably somebody will eventually do a mortal sin. So the church, the Eucharistic organism, or a hierarchy in a bishop and priest according to the succession of apostles, and that's true in many places. The apostolic succession going all the way back to Peter.

A common view is a church is believers in Jesus. Again, I'm just referring to the handout here. Believers in Jesus who are organized as a community, the spirit united for a mission of exaltation, evangelism, edification. So in this view, and this is probably the biblical view, is the church is a group of confessing believers in Jesus.

But when I was at church yesterday, as I'm recording this, I was in my church, Grace Community Church in Gresham, Oregon. And there were people there who are not believers in Jesus Christ, but they are part of our group, and are there often. Are they part of the church? We'll see there is a difference between church as a redemptive community, redeemed community, which I think the church should be a community that redeemed, and a church as a social group that includes lots of people who are not a part of church in the more biblical sense of the word.

So what is church? We just have to have a more complicated view in that, because the church is a social organization. Whoever shows up and is participating in my particular congregation. There's church in a biblical sense, those who are connected with Jesus Christ and a part of the body of Christ in that biblical sense. A church is a building, a church is a ... meets regularly, all these different kinds of things.

But the heart of the definition for me, biblically, is a group of redeemed people who are connected to each other, devoted to the apostles' teaching, sharing their things together, and on a mission to take the good news of Jesus Christ to the world, and build each other up.

What differentiates that from a home Bible study? We call them communities of grace. And so you've got three or four families that get together in a committed group, and what separates that from the larger group, you can have no end of problems if you get down to this. But let's make two basic definitions. One is the body of Christ, which is believers, in my judgment, and my Baptist roots will be very clear here, is the church is made up of believers in Jesus Christ, in the more biblical sense of it as the body of Christ. But then a sociological sense, it includes a lot of people who are not believers. That could be children who are too young really to make a commitment of faith yet, and families and friends who are still a part of the organization on a regular basis. And we greet each other and have a deep relation, but they're not believers in Jesus Christ. So there's a body of Christ view, and then there's a sociological group, and I think we have to have both of those.

So I talk about is the sociological group is the church plus friends. So it's a Thanksgiving dinner that's for family, but we have guests that come in too, and such where it's coming in. And one of the questions, again, this is a differentiating question, does the church have a priesthood, or is the church a priesthood? Or is a church made of priests? If you're part of a Catholic church, Anglo Catholic or Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox Church, has a ordained priesthood, and only priests can actually do the sacerdotal things like Eucharist and confession, or baptism. So in Roman Catholic view, the only person who could do a baptism for example, is an ordained priest, and in good fellowship with the Bishop of the church. And we'll talk about this in a bit.

In our church, which is a free church, we would say the church, the body of Christ church, is made up of priests. Any person is a priest and can do priestly duties. So what do priests do? Well, biblically priests have access to God, and I would say that's any believer has access to God, and they're performing redemptive sacrifices. Well, redemptive sacrifice is not killing animals, but redemptive sacrifices here is sacrificing my privileges for the sake of other people. That's redemptive sacrifice, because that kindness is what leads people to salvation.

I think of a fellow I know quite well, again, I'm being vague, who has just come into the church, even though he was hurt deeply by the church as a young man, and wants nothing to do with it, he is now a full member of a good church, because of the kindness of that church. And he just can't quite escape that. It's just an odd kind of thing to see how, because of people doing priestly things for him, it's working out quite well.

So that priesthood is doing redemptive sacrifices, kindness, giving up my privilege for the sake of other people, and hearing confession of sin. See again, if you're Roman Catholic, the only person who can hear confession in a sacramental sense is an ordained priest. In my church, we hear each other's confession of sin, and I think the idea that we should confess our sin only to God is ... Can I put a stupid button on somebody for believing that? Because we need believers to help us in that process. And I think believers should help each other a lot.

It used to be that the pastors were the functional priests. Now most pastors don't do it, they offload it to counselors to do it. And I think we need to get back to a universal priesthood believers where we help each other do spiritual work, of confession and receiving the blessing of God, announcing forgiveness and blessing. These are all in here giving spiritual guidance. I think we should all, part of the church, be priests before God, as well as the church being a priesthood that takes the good news of kindness and grace of God to a world that does not know that.

So where I come on in this, I think every believer is a priest and should be better at it, and the church as a whole has a priestly duty to mediate the goodness of God to the community around. So much to play with there, but I'll just leave it at that.

Another question is what is the relation between the church and the world around us? And again, this is where there's a lot of variation. And in the handout I've got some stuff here that's adapted from Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture book, and there's one group that's the church is against culture. And that's the picture that we have of the church going out with the big black Bible and whacking people for being evil-doers out there. And some of this is coming out in the current Christian nationalism movement, which is not a lot of Christian but a lot of nationalism, and we're here to point out the evils of society and condemn them for it.

There's another view that church is over culture, which is a medieval Roman Catholic church. We had the famous picture of the Holy Roman emperor being crowned by the pope and that's what gave legitimacy. And then so it'd be the church over culture. Only the church can say who the king is going to be. I don't know of anybody in the Christian world today, but you certainly find it in say, Iran, where the power structure is really the mullahs, not the political leaders.

There's a church and culture that are two different spheres, and that would be Luther's phrase, where they're side by side each having their areas of responsibility. The more Calvin perspective is church transforming culture, using political means to accomplish the Christianization of the world around. So his famous experiment to have the Christian city there in Geneva. And here in the United States, there are several cities that were founded here that were founded to be Christian cities, Westminster, California. I was in Westminster recently, nothing even vaguely Christian there, but it was founded as a Christian society. A number of churches back in Michigan same kind of thing.

The common view today would be the church lost in culture. The culture wins, and the church becomes almost a non-factor in the political power of the social culture, which is much more powerful than the church. And the church has become so accommodating at an attempt to be relevant, that it's not much of a church anymore. That's true in a lot of cases.

We have, to some degree, here in the United States, culture against church. The culture is actually antagonistic to church. We find that not in a legal sense, we do find it somewhat in a cultural sense. In other places in the world, that's a huge issue. When I talk to my friends who live in China, for example, in some parts of China, they have to be extremely careful because the culture is very much, the government is very much against the church, and the persecuted church.

So how does the church relate to the culture around us? And what I think, where I come out on this kind of thing, I don't think really the church should be using political means to accomplish the goals of the church. And I'm standing in disagreement with a lot of people I know who just really disagree. "We need to elect Christian officials, put them in power places, and so they can root out the evils in our society in the name of Jesus." I'm super glad for Christians who are good people in government, and there are quite a few of them, profoundly grateful for them. The mayor of Gresham, Oregon, was a member of our ... he's not the mayor anymore, but he's a member of our congregation, and served very well in my judgment. But I don't think the church accomplishes the church's goals by political means.

Where I come out is the church in a prophetic relation to the culture around us. So I think what the church should do is proclaim God's righteousness in deed, and then in word. So we create an alternative community, or we practice discipleship and practice righteousness in our community, and then we do that by word, speaking the righteousness of God, but only after we do it, to a large degree. And then secondly, we expose the evils of society around us, but we always do it in a context of grace. Instead of condemning you evil so-and-so, it should be, "Man, you guys are in a bad spot. We'd be glad to help."

So my approach to how we relate to our culture around us, and we certainly do this in grace in many other churches, I just know my church better than most, is we decided, we sat down as elders here oh, a dozen years ago and said, "Really, if Jesus came and raptured us out of here, would anybody miss us?" And we came to the conclusion, "I'm not sure the city of Gresham would really miss Grace Community Church if we got raptured out." And we said, "That's not okay."

So we sat down and began to think very creatively, along with other churches in our community, what can you do to make a difference? And we found out we could make a lot of difference working with our schools, working with the foster parents system, just a number of different areas that we connect into. The food bank out in East County runs through our building, and then we go out into other buildings around. We run foster parents' night out as an official program where foster parents can drop off their kids, and fully approved, and have a four-hour respite.

The funny thing was under COVID, which happened within my easy memory, we have been having what we call Advent Conspiracy in our building for quite a while. And so we have a neighborhood party, and the local grade school that we have a very good relationship with, advertises Grace Community Church's Advent Conspiracy Party. It's an invitation to the entire neighborhood. "Come in, we've got food, we've got games, we've got clothes available." We even started giving away Christmas trees, then discovered some of the poor people don't have cars, so we'll deliver the Christmas tree to their home for them.

Well under COVID, they shut everything down. We got a call from the people in the city of Gresham saying, "Are you guys not ... Can you not close down your Advent Conspiracy?" And we got thinking, well. So we ended up having an outdoor drive-by Advent Conspiracy, and did it all outside. We had almost twice as many people in that year that we've had at other times. I mean, serve our community with joy, and it's amazing.

Our Vacation Bible School has become a magnet for community kids. Because why? We're serving our community, and we don't even hesitate to put in the name of Jesus there. "You're trying to convert us." "Yep, we sure are. You bet. We think we've got a great idea. Why don't you come join us? We'll give you a free cup of coffee while you're here." Come [inaudible].

But that's how you're prophetically proclaiming Christ's righteousness as a community of disciples by deed first, and then by word. And then when we talk about the evils in our society, we don't do it in a condemning context, but how can we help? A context of grace. I think that's a great way to do things.

How is it a conspiracy? Where did it come from?

Advent Conspiracy. Rick McKinley at Imago Deo did his DMin dissertation at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and he developed this idea of advent conspiracy from Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy. And let's have a conspiracy to spend less, I forget what the four things are, but spend less, love more, and that kind of stuff. And the conspiracy is to be Kingdom of God in the midst of the world. So he just ripped off Dallas Willard's book title, and made it into conspiracy.

So we adopted that as a kind of internal thing, we don't use that term outside the church. But it's really fun. And we have quite a few of those. We have several of those during the year, which are .... It's a lot of work for our church. It's a lot of work. But the community that gathers together as we serve our community is just amazing. We do a lot of different things, tutoring programs, and just a lot of things. And our building, we make available to local civic organizations at nominal rent. And we have people in our building all the time using it for various things. I think we should be the community.

Now, to be fair, to be fair, you're seeing my brethren roots, because my roots are Anabaptist Brethren, Church of the Brethren, and that's the theology of the Brethren Church is to be a community of disciples serving the people around you in goodness, and that's where I'm at, is I'm living out that background. So that's where that's at.

So that's something about the church, the nature of the church is we're a celebrating community of disciples, celebrating the goodness of God, building each other to be more faithful as a community of disciples. But then from this basis of people taking care of each other, loving each other, they're going to reach out to the people who are part of our sociological congregation, but reaching beyond that, to do good in the community.

So one of my key phrases that comes out of Galatians Chapter six, some great things, Paul concludes his chapter here, talks about if someone caught in sin, restore the person gently, watch yourselves. But if you come down to this Verse 10, well, Verse nine, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will receive a harvest if we do not give up." Let's keep on doing good. And then Verse 10, "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers." And that's just a watchword for what we do.

We're going to begin with a community believers caring for each others, but we're going to extend that way beyond the walls of our building, way beyond the boundaries of our own community. And I think the way it should be done, and we're not the only ones. There's so many stories. One of the ... East Hill Church is a big Foursquare church just down the street from us. And the pastor's a good friend, and they do a block party, 4th of July block party for the entire city.

And so this guy walked by and they're having this block party and, "What's going on here?" "Oh, we're having a concert. Forgot to say. Here, have a brat and a beer." "Who are you?" "We're East Hill church and we're here celebrating Jesus the 4th of July. Come on, join the party. Here, have a brat and a beer." "You're a what?" "We're East Hill church, and we're here celebrating Jesus. We're having a party. Got some good bands over there, got several different things going on. Come on. Here, have a brat and a beer." "What are you guys doing?" "We're having a celebration." It went on, and finally the guy said, "I never heard of such a thing." "Well, okay, great, we'll tell you about it. Here, have a brat and a beer, and come on in." And the guy became a Jesus follower because he got invited to a party. And it really was a party. It wasn't a bait and switch kind of thing.

But let's celebrate together, invite people to join in the celebration. I think it's a good way to do church. So that's my base idea of what a church is. It's a community of disciples of Jesus Christ with really good news, and we're going to celebrate with love and joy and peace. And we're going to point out the evils, but always from a context of, "Let us help," rather than, "You're miserable sinners going to hell." So that's what we do. Questions?

I've just been thinking about some of the things that, to grab a title, the church gave the world. And the things that attracted to the world at first was our ethics, and our value of life. So actually that's ... culture and Christianity aren't intertwined at that point, but would be an example.

But then you have all the building of schools and hospitals, which starts to pull things a little more intertwined. And then you have the abolition of slavery, starting with the Roman amphitheater up through Wilberforce, where the church really is intertwined with culture at that point. So I'm assuming you wouldn't disagree with any of those things, but it brings them ... they do overlap.

The church and culture very much overlap. And when I use the term culture, we're not separate from the culture, we're a part of it. But we're celebrating Jesus and I'm talking about culture, those who don't celebrate Jesus and some of whom are very antagonistic to Christianity for various reasons. And we certainly have a culture today, again in my take, you've got the devil and his crowd, narcissistic, "What's in it for me?" Power, "I'll hurt you if you get my way," and unrestrained passions, "I do whatever I want whenever I want to make me feel good." That's the ethic of the other gods. And that's the ethic of our mainstream culture in many ... especially out here.

The ethic of Jesus is gather power for the sake of serving, especially the forgotten. You have that non-retaliatory ethic that says love your enemy and feed the one who hurts you. And then you have focused passions for the sake of building relationships. They're completely different views between the spiritual beings here, and then Yahweh and the angels and the people. And we're talking about that war that's behind the culture that goes on.

I grew up in Missouri, and where I grew up till I was in fifth grade, everybody was a Christian. They may not go to church, but everybody was nominally Christian. So the difference between church and culture was not obvious at all, except who went to ... who's part of an official church or not. That's real different out here, and where I'm at, because nobody goes to church here, identifies in Christian unless they got a really commitment to Jesus. So it varies a lot by what your culture is.