Church As We Know It

It is said that “old habits die hard.” Nowhere is this old adage more true than in that strange Sunday morning subculture known as “church”. To this day, centuries old traditions dominate our churches, and to suggest any changes to these long standing paradigms remains anathema in the minds of many. Yet it is these longstanding traditions, or “church as we know it”, that pose the greatest obstacles to the church realizing its call of “making disciples of all nations” as Christ has called it to do.

What is a church? Line up ten believers and ask them this question, and chances are, you’ll get the patent theologically correct answer: “a church is any body of believers meeting in the name of Christ.” This answer is doubtless the correct one and the Biblical one, to which almost all of us would be in agreement. However, a completely different definition of church would be closer to our actual practice today: “church is an attractional event that meets once a week in a specially dedicated building, run by paid religious professionals, lasting 70-90 minutes in duration.” Perhaps that answer would be more in harmony with the attitudes and underlying paradigms at work in the vast majority of churches today.

Clearly, all of us realize that church is much more than a service once a week. Yet suggest any other template for a new church plant, and expect some confused looks from listeners. “How can a church be a church without a building? How can it be a viable community without a paid pastor? Certainly there must be a sermon of 30-40 minutes duration.” These are the objections, if not spoken, that would be common in the minds of many. It’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for Christians today to conceive of church without the traditional Sunday morning service. Remove these dominant features of the Sunday morning service, take away the minister, remove the three-song worship set, and subtract the thimble and wafer known as communion, and many would cease to define the remains as church any longer.

The efforts of today’s church, in distinction to the New Testament model, revolve completely around the Sunday morning service. Think of the effort, time, and resources that is poured into a single hour service once a week. Given the tremendous importance that we place on this one weekly event, you would expect that Scripture would be chock full of references that guide us in how this event should be done. But curiously, there are none. When one looks at Scripture, one will search in vain for commands on how to pull off the important weekly event we commonly know as “church,” but hundreds on how we should live in community and honor God with our lives together. To quote William Law, a mentor of John Wesley: “it is very observable that there is not one command in all the Gospel for public worship; and perhaps it is a duty that is least insisted upon in Scripture of any other. The frequent attendance at it is never so much as mentioned in all the New Testament, whereas that religion or devotion which is to govern the ordinary actions of our life is be found in almost every verse of Scripture.” The focus of the New Testament church is not on a Sunday morning service, but in honoring God as we live in community with one another. To the early church, church was not a service meeting once a week, but an organic movement of “called out ones” demonstrating their faith in everyday, yet radical ways. The focus of the early church was on living together in community rather than Sunday morning processes.

It is clear that the Bible neither prescribes nor promotes the traditional model of the local church as we know it today. The current Sunday morning service of church so prevalent in the Western world is neither Biblical nor unbiblical, but rather abiblical. “Church as we know it” is just one interpretation that human beings have devised on how to live a godly life in community, and nowhere are we commanded that the dominant Sunday morning service paradigm is the only viable model for being the church together. As priests of the Lord, the church has freedom and latitude to use whatever means necessary, including modifying the basic blueprint of its meetings and structure if it means greater missional impact and greater growth in its members.

But would a new paradigm look like for today’s church? We will continue to explore this in our next post.