‘Do’ Church or ‘Be’ Church?
Recently I was sent a comment:
“Through the ages man appears to have a great capacity to forget what God understands to be His Church. Are we called to “do” church or are we called to “be” part of the Church (Christ’s Bride)?”
I thought I would respond with a post rather than a reply because this is a very common question these days. Bridget Willard made a similar comment:
“Church isn’t where you meet. Church isn’t a building. Church is what you do. Church is who you are. Church is the human outworking of the person of Jesus Christ. Let’s not go to Church, let’s be the Church.”
So, let me respond. Firstly, I think the two phrases can be difficult to understand. What means to ‘be the church’ can be different to different people, so if I don’t sound the same as you on something it could be we have different understandings of the phrases. Secondly, I think this is a false dichotomy: being or doing. Church must be both.
On one hand you need to ‘be’ the church, without which you don’t understand salvation. God has sent Jesus to save us from things to to things. He has sent Jesus to save us from our sins, death and the devil. But he has also saved us to a life of freedom and more importantly to save us into a new people, a new community (1 Peter 2:9-10). Being the church is the goal of salvation.
But because we ‘are’ the church, we ‘do’ church. One of the ways that church is talked about is as a body (1 Cor 12:12) and it needs to be run under the principle of love (1 Cor 13) and so the gifts that Jesus gives different people are for the building up of the church (1 Cor 14:26) especially as each member of the church does it’s part (Eph 4:16). Hence church needs to be ‘done’ because God has given us different gifts so we must lovingly rely on each other to get to heaven.
Or let me use another argument. Most people think the word church means ‘gathering’. But it means so much more than that. It is used to translate the Greek word ‘ekklesia’. This is one of the words that the first Christians could have used to call their gatherings, another being synagogue. (We think one is Jewish and the other is Christian, but this is something that happened over time. Christians could have called themselves Christian synagogues and it would have been right and easier for them to do so). So what would the average person in C1st heard when they heard of a Christian ekklesia? Coenen(1) explains:
“ekklesia..(d)enotes in the usage of antiquity the popular assembly of the competent full citizens of the polis, city”
“In contrast to ekklesia, which had become a technical term by an early date, the other word which is important to us in this context, synangoge, exhibited from the first a wide breadth of usage. It denoted quite generally, in the translated sense, the collecting or bringing together of things (books, letters, possessions, fruit at harvest time) and also of troops and people.”
“Thus ekklesia, centuries before the translation of the OT and the time of the NT, was clearly characterized as a political phenomenon, repeated according to certain rules and within a certain framework.”
In short a synagogue was a gathering, but an ekklesia was a political gathering where the citizens of a city would gather to enjoy their citizenship and fulfill their responsibilities of that citizenship. Not all the people living in a town could be a citizen, only the free and only the men. To be a citizen and not attend an ekklesia is, for the ancient world, bizarre and would only happen for good reason.
In a Christian ekklesia, the citizenship is open to all who are free in Christ, not just the men or legally free. To be a citizen of heaven is a gift. But it is the place where the Kingdom of God is expressed as the citizens of heaven (Phil 3:20) come and enjoy their citizenship and fulfill their responsibilities. They ‘do’ church.
So, what does all this mean? Because we are church we do church. Putting a dichotomy between them profoundly misunderstands what ‘church’ is.
(1) L. Coenen, “Church,” in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1986), 291. See also P. T. O’Brien, “The Church as a Heavenly and Eschatological Entity,” in Church in the Bible and the World (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1987), 90. Also refer to G R. Stanton, Athenian Politics c. 800-500 BC, A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
